Most of us spend most of our day online, so the browser window is what we see most of the time. This art project makes that view visible.

It’s a Chrome extension that quietly samples whatever is in my browser window while I work. About once a minute, it captures the visible tab, shrinks it in memory, keeps the six dominant colors, and discards the image. It saves only the colors and a timestamp, never screenshots, page addresses, or titles.

The colors collect in a logbook built like a diary. A day appears as a 24-hour color barcode, a week as seven stacked strips with a weekday-versus-weekend comparison, and a year as one square per day. My days turned out mostly white and gray, fairly representative of the World Wide Web at work, so the logbook can switch to an accents-only view that shows the color underneath and marks each week’s dominant accent color.

• Ambient by design. It records continuously until I switch it off.

• Real pixels, not page styles. Photos, video, and large areas of white all count because they're what actually fill the window.

• Private by design. Nothing leaves the browser, and it skips idle time, private windows, and any sites I exclude.

• Desktop Chrome only, for now. Phone time happens mostly in apps, which this approach wouldn’t capture.

• An art piece and a working prototype, not a product.