David Blaine
Official Website, 2006
- Role
- Art direction & engineering
- Relationship
- ~6 years, through the ABC-specials era and the 2010 redesign
- Target
- Full digital presence for Drowned Alive — built to hold national traffic and collect fan engagement during a live seven-day stunt at Lincoln Center, May 1–8, 2006
- Constraints
- 2006 · Blaine's own production team as client · site required to sustain peak load during the live stunt window
- Force fielded
- Nick Charney Kaye — art direction & engineering
- Time-to-dispatch
- Site live for Drowned Alive, May 1, 2006; engagement extended through the 2010 redesign
- Result
- davidblaine.com relaunched — 1M+ unique visitors a day at peak, ~10 min average visit, 300,000 fan messages collected; the 2006 build is memorialized on davidblaine.com
- Principal
- David Blaine / D. Blaine Productions
- 1M+ unique visitors a dayArchival · 2006
- ~10 min average visitArchival · 2006
- 300,000 fan messages collectedArchival · 2006
In 2006, magician and endurance artist David Blaine handed over a hundred-year-old first edition of Dante’s Inferno, illustrated with Gustave Doré’s engravings, and asked for a website. What came back was davidblaine.com relaunched for Drowned Alive — seven days submerged in an eight-foot acrylic sphere at Lincoln Center, May 1–8, 2006 — a site that drew over a million unique visitors a day during the stunt, held them for a ten-minute average visit, and collected some 300,000 fan messages.
The site’s architecture was a deck of cards: each section designed around a Tarot card, navigated through a ring of dark orbs. So read this page the way the site was built — as a spread.
The spread
I. The Hanged Man — the front page. Doré’s engraved textures, Victorian corner angels, and a circular navigation orbiting a red heart-and-dagger seal. Surrender as spectacle: a man suspends himself in water and the world logs on to watch.
II. Death — Cheating Death. The stunt timeline: Buried Alive (1999), Frozen in Time (2000), Vertigo (2002), Above the Below (2003), Drowned Alive (2006). Death drawn upright — transformation, not ending — five posters of a man practicing impermanence in public.
III. The Moon — Musings. A chalkboard journal in Blaine’s own hand: “I think all of the good books that I have read have taught me so much more than movies or any other resource including school.” The About page held the tender card in the deck — chalk-written lines about the mother who raised him alone.
IV. The World — the event. As an underground plug for the official Drowned Alive poster by Mark Stutzman, we ran this ransom-note style collage I made from it: NYC · MAY 1–8 · LINCOLN CENTER · FAILURE MEANS A DROWNING DEATH.
The engagement
The relationship ran roughly six years across the D. Blaine Productions team — through the ABC specials era and the 2010 redesign (hero mural by Mark Stutzman, the illustrator of the 1993 Elvis stamp), and on to a parallax-scrolling CMS showcase built by Outright Mental in the Electrified era.
The studio’s two other interactive commissions of the era answered the same question with different objects: Running Heavy made the interface a place you sit inside, and Lonneke Engel stripped it to a white room with a dock of painted icons. A deck of cards, a truck cab, an empty desk — three clients, three metaphors.
The manifesto names the edge this work lived on: the moment when the mind is exposed and something more honest becomes possible. Blaine’s entire art is look directly, proceed anyway — a man who rehearses death and invites the audience to watch without flinching. The site’s job was to hold that gaze online.
Proof: Blaine’s current site still memorializes it — drowned-alive/drowned-website plays a screen-capture tour of the 2006 build. See also davidblaine.com/drowned-alive.
Brand moments built to hold a gaze like this one are commissioned today through Branded Play.
