Opening: Friday 12-04-2024 18:00 -> 00:00

This installation participates at the open doors weekends of Parcours d’Artistes Saint-Gilles 2024

Declarations is an ongoing artistic research project that looks into the poetic materiality of the CSS web-language. The project is initiated by graphic designer Doriane Timmermans, a member of the collective Open Source Publishing.

CSS tells a browser, screen, phone, smartwatch - and devices from the past or yet to be imagined - how text flows, spaces are divided, hyperlinks are clicked, menus unfolded, and notification bubbled. It takes care of colors, mouvement, scrolling, animations and responsiveness. Every lines of the CSS language is called a ’declaration’.

Doriane invited a group of artists, writers, amateurs, designers and hackers to came together for a week to inspect a shift in design practices emerging from the nature of the web: as it is made of text, designing become writing. Makers of the web are becoming both authors and architects, and websites become a work of articulations. Questions are asked such as who decide of the words we use to shape the web, and what does they induce on our uses of technology, in terms of power and accessibility.

The group researched how the malleability of language is used to dialogue with a multitude of unknown canvases; how, similarly to the choice of words we decide to use to tell a story, designing with declarations, speak about our intentions, and encodes narrations into the things we make.

The results of this worksession, the first of this research, are presented as an installation in Constant’s window.