I designed and developed the website for Ben Hagari, a video and installation artist. In response to Ben's wanting “the website to be an introduction to my worlds,” I prioritized cinematic immersion and world-building across the site. Drawing from Ben's fascination with the magic of theatre—its artifice and the contrast between facade and backstage—as well as his interest in the origins of moving images, the website stages a series of cinematic transitions. The centerpiece is the early film technique of the iris-shot, reimagined as the site's primary transition between pages.
To foster an absurdist sense of discovery and world-building from the first click, each visit to the homepage opens with a representative video, which then gives way to custom iris-shot transitions, their shapes drawn from a broad array of objects within Ben's artistic vocabulary. This sense of entering new worlds continues through the Works page, where hovering over project thumbnails triggers color-tinted previews, each hue offering a glimpse of the distinct “world” of that particular work.
