Sometimes Red Sometimes Blue: the website that is one color

Sometimes Red Sometimes Blue is a website that loads a single flat color, red or blue, chosen at random, and then stops. There is no logo, no menu, no text, and no second screen. It is an artwork by Damon Zucconi, made in 2007, and the whole of it is one short HTML file that flips a coin every time the page opens.

Most sites spend their first second asking for attention. This one spends it choosing a color and going quiet. The result is closer to looking at a painted wall than to using software, which is exactly the point.

In brief

• Each visit paints the browser pure red or pure blue, decided by a random coin flip, and shows nothing else.
• It is a 2007 net artwork by Damon Zucconi, an artist born in 1985 who studied at the Maryland Institute College of Art.
• The entire site is one HTML page with a single line of JavaScript, now kept open on GitHub.
• That line still uses document.bgColor, a browser feature that was already on its way out when the piece was made.

What actually happens when the page loads

The behavior is as plain as it sounds. On each load the page runs one instruction, picks a number, and sets the background to one of two colors. If the number lands under one half it goes blue, otherwise it goes red. There is no animation, no fade, and no way to switch by hand. The only control a visitor has is the refresh button.

Because the choice is random and even, a long session turns into a slow sequence of red, red, blue, red, blue, blue. No run is promised and no pattern is built in. A visitor who reloads twenty times is simply watching a coin get tossed twenty times, rendered at full screen.

There is no state saved between visits either. The page does not remember the last color, does not try to balance the count, and does not avoid repeats. Every load is a fresh, independent flip, which is why a visitor can hit red four times in a row and then blue twice and find nothing wrong with it. The randomness is honest, with no hand on the scale.

The two colors are not vague. They are the maximum values a screen can show: a pure red and a pure blue with nothing mixed in. That choice matters. Instead of a tasteful shade, the page commits to the loudest red and the loudest blue a monitor can produce, which makes the flat field feel less like decoration and more like a signal.

The whole thing is one line

The source is public, and it is short enough to read in a breath. Zucconi keeps the project on GitHub, where the working part of the page is a single statement that reads, in plain terms, pick a random number, and if it is below one half paint the document blue, otherwise paint it red. Everything else in the file is the usual wrapping: a title, an author tag, and a small analytics snippet.

There is something honest about a work whose entire mechanism fits on one line and whose source is open for anyone to copy. Nothing is hidden behind a build step or a framework. The idea and the implementation are the same size. A curious visitor can read the code faster than they can read this paragraph, and once they have read it there is nothing left to discover, only something left to watch.

The one piece of machinery the file does carry is a small analytics snippet, the standard Google tracking tag, sitting in the markup on GitHub right below the color line. It is a quietly funny detail. A page with nothing to click and nothing to read still counts its visitors, dutifully measuring engagement with a surface that offers nothing to engage. The metric exists, even when the thing being measured is a colored void.

Why the code looks dated on purpose

The instruction sets the color through document.bgColor, a property that reaches back to the earliest days of web pages. According to MDN Web Docs, the property is deprecated, and modern pages are meant to set a background through CSS instead. It still works in browsers today, which is why a page written in 2007 keeps running without changes, but no one teaching web development now would reach for it.

That gives the piece a quiet second layer. It is not only a random color, it is a random color produced by a method the web has officially moved past. The work keeps breathing through a feature browsers agreed to retire, which is its own small comment on how little of the old web actually dies.

Who made it, and why that matters

Damon Zucconi is an artist who works across websites, video, painting, and sculpture. His gallery, JTT in New York, lists him as born in 1985 and notes a bachelor of fine arts from the Maryland Institute College of Art in 2007, the same year this site appeared, according to the gallery's biography. He is not a hobbyist who put up a joke domain. The color page sits inside a long practice of web-based art.

That context changes how the page reads. On its own it looks like a prank or a placeholder. Placed in an artist's catalog of works, it becomes a deliberate object, a piece that happens to live at a web address rather than on a wall. The domain is not a billboard for something else. The domain is the work.

A piece from the surf club era

Zucconi came up in the mid-2000s wave of artists who treated the browser as a studio. In a 2016 artist profile published by Rhizome, the long-running net art organization, he described a preference for forms of production where publishing is almost a side effect, where the process itself becomes part of the public record. A page that quietly repaints itself fits that outlook. It publishes a decision, over and over, and asks nothing in return.

This was the period of the so-called surf clubs, group blogs where artists posted and remixed images they found online. Work from that scene often prized the small gesture, the found object, and the gag that turned into something sincere on a second look. Sometimes Red Sometimes Blue carries that spirit into a single, stubborn page.

The browser as a canvas

To understand why a flat color counts as a work, it helps to know the field it belongs to. Net art is art made for and inside the web browser, using links, code, and the page itself as material rather than as a frame around a photograph of something else. Rhizome, the organization that published the profile of Zucconi, has championed that practice for decades and keeps an archive of born-digital work. In that world a webpage is not a document about art. It can be the art.

Seen through that lens, the choices in this piece stop looking arbitrary. The decision to occupy the entire window, to use the browser's own color property, to leave no caption and no exit, these are the brushstrokes. The medium is the page, and the page is doing the one thing a page can do that a canvas cannot: it can be slightly different every time someone looks.

That difference is the hinge the whole work turns on. A painting hangs and stays. This page is reborn on every visit, never promising which color it will be, which makes the act of looking into a small event rather than a settled fact. The art is not the red or the blue. The art is the flip between them, performed live, in the viewer's own browser.

What it feels like to use

There is no task here, so the usual words for using a website do not apply. A visitor arrives, sees a color, and then has to decide what to do with a screen that refuses to do anything. For a few seconds this is funny. After that it becomes oddly calming, because the page has removed every decision except one: reload, or leave.

Reloading turns into a rhythm. Red. Blue. Red. Red. The eye starts to predict, the way it does with a coin, and the page keeps refusing to be predictable. Some people will close the tab in five seconds. Others will sit and flip it a few dozen times, half waiting for a streak, half enjoying that there is nothing to wait for.

The effect depends on the full screen. A small swatch of red is a color sample. A browser window flooded edge to edge with pure red is a mood. By taking over the whole viewport and offering no frame, the page turns a trivial choice into something closer to a field of color, the kind a visitor might stand in front of in a gallery and feel before they think.

Two colors, no explanation

The title names the behavior and nothing more. It does not say why red, why blue, or why only two. The absence of an explanation is part of the design. Red and blue arrive loaded with associations, hot and cold, stop and go, one side and the other, and the page invites all of them while endorsing none. It simply alternates and lets the visitor supply the meaning, or decline to.

That restraint is rare on the modern web, where almost every surface is labeled, captioned, and optimized to be understood in an instant. Here the only caption is in the browser tab, and it just repeats the title and the year. The page trusts the visitor to sit with ambiguity, which is a lot to ask of a format built for clarity.

Why a flat color still works online

The site keeps running for the same reason it is easy to dismiss: it needs almost nothing. One file, two colors, one line of logic. There is no database, no account, and no feature to maintain. Zucconi now serves it through a static host and redeploys automatically whenever the source changes, which means a page conceived in 2007 can stay live with effectively zero upkeep.

That durability is a feature, not an accident. Heavier sites rot as their dependencies age and their servers change. A page that is basically a colored rectangle has almost nothing to break. It is the web equivalent of a stone left in a field, outlasting the more elaborate structures built around it precisely because it asks so little.

It also belongs to a small tradition of single-purpose pages that commit entirely to one gesture. The appeal is the same each time: a clear idea, executed without clutter, hosted at an address that promises exactly what it delivers. For visitors who enjoy that kind of restraint, the wider world of calm, single-minded sites is worth a wander, from color fields like this one to the gentle corners collected around Boring Websites.

A note on the two colors

Red and blue are not a neutral pairing, and the full intensity makes them harder to ignore. At maximum brightness, a screen-wide field of pure red tends to feel close and warm, almost pressing forward, while pure blue tends to feel cooler and to sit back a little. Switching between them on reload is a small shock each time, because the eye has to re-adjust from one extreme to the other with no middle step to cushion the change.

Stare at either long enough and the effect compounds. A solid color with no edges gives the eye nothing to focus on, so attention starts to drift and the color seems to hum. This is the same reason color-field paintings reward standing close: remove the picture, and what is left is the raw sensation of hue. The page recreates that experience with the cheapest possible means, a line of code and a browser window, and it does so differently on every visit.

The alternation is what keeps it from being a wallpaper. A single unchanging color would be a background. Two colors trading places at random become a tiny, ongoing decision the visitor keeps witnessing, which is enough to hold a surprising amount of attention for something so plain.

Is it a joke or is it serious?

The honest answer is both, and the page is comfortable being both at once. As a joke it is perfect, a website that bravely commits to being one of two colors and nothing else. As a serious work it asks a real question about how little a web page can contain and still hold a viewer's attention. The two readings do not fight. They are the same page seen in different lights, which is a fitting result for a site built on a coin flip.

That is the quiet achievement of Sometimes Red Sometimes Blue. It takes the smallest possible action a web page can perform, repeats it forever, and lets each visitor decide whether they have found a gag, a painting, or just a wall. The page does not care which. It will be red, and then it will be blue, for as long as browsers keep opening it.

FAQ

What is Sometimes Red Sometimes Blue?

It is a website and artwork made by Damon Zucconi in 2007. Each time the page loads it fills the whole browser with either a pure red or a pure blue background, chosen at random, and shows no other content.

How does it decide the color?

The page runs one line of JavaScript that picks a random number and sets the background to blue if the number is below one half and red otherwise. The source is public on GitHub, so anyone can read the exact instruction.

Can a visitor choose red or blue?

No. There is no button or setting. The only way to change the color is to reload the page and accept whatever the random coin flip returns, which is part of the work's design.

Who is Damon Zucconi?

He is an artist born in 1985 who works in web-based art, video, painting, and sculpture, and is represented by the gallery JTT in New York. Sometimes Red Sometimes Blue is one of his early internet works, made the same year he finished his degree.

Is Sometimes Red Sometimes Blue still online?

Yes. The page is still live at its original address and is now served from a static host, with the source kept open on GitHub. Because the whole site is one small file with no moving parts, it needs almost no upkeep and keeps running unchanged.