POV: You're A Bug

Creative Code. Made in Summer 2026.

Recently I revisited the Philips Collection’s Rothko room. I never quite “got” the Rothkos. This time, after failing to will the cathedral-like atmosphere into a revelation, I let Orange and Red on Red fill my entire periphery. To my surprise, I felt nauseatingly disoriented. Disorientation eventually gave way to a sense of awe at the pure scale of the painting. I experienced a close-up in real life.

The close-up is a medium, a way of experiencing. Can we experience close-ups on the web? What would it look like? What would it feel like?

POV: You’re A Bug (browser extension) is an attempt to replicate this aesthetic experience. It allows users to zoom in infinitely on any website, by holding SHIFT while scrolling. Instead of restacking the site’s contents to fit within the frame of the browser, POV: You’re A Bug scales elements beyond it.

Browsing the web with POV: You’re A Bug is intentionally inconvenient. Infinite zoom is not a useful (read: productive) interaction: as digital landmarks scroll out of view, the user is forced into laborious traversals. The SHIFT-and-scroll gesture refuses precise control and clashes with existing keyboard shortcuts on certain sites.

Altogether, POV: You’re A Bug forces surrender of orientation as the user traverses the web, approximating the perceptual instability of the close-up.

I began thinking about this when collaging: I noticed that my works default to a smallish size. The substrates that I select, the pieces of paper I carve out, the frames I subsequently arrange together - somehow all end up palm-sized, or at most, roughly as wide as my laptop screen.

What happened? As a child, I would draw almost exclusively on A3 papers, the back side of architectural plans my dad brought home. Imaginary landscapes with trains and houses, plans for imaginary elementary schools, maps for imaginary countries with crisscrossing rivers and mountains. Everything, panoramic. Between then and now, my default viewport compressed.

Maybe my phone is to blame. I view so much content all the time via its tiny screen, no larger than my palm. And yet, a larger screen - say, a monitor - would not restore scale, as it only fits more of the same smalls into more space. Seeing everything at close range, yet I do not experience any of them via the close-up. Digital interfaces privilege control: fitting windows neatly into manageable arrays, minimized if need be. In this regime, disorientation is always strategically avoided. The close-up becomes impossible as scale never overwhelms perception, images never fragmented to such a degree that the mind has to reconstruct wholes from parts, meaning from symbols.

POV: You’re A Bug reintroduces such overwhelming fragmentation at the cost of utility. The Internet, marginally harder to traverse, becomes newly perceptible.

Try POV: You're A Bug from the Chrome Web Store.