The Website fabulations encounter explores website modifications as a way of taking agency on already designed websites. Inspired by the notion of ’tactical design’ (cf Nolwenn Maudet), we remix the web as a user-hacker, questioning our agency as individuals and collectivities on the web.

User-customisation for web pages used to be part of collective spaces on the web (geocities, myspace, tumblr and handmade webpages and webrings) and is now homogenised and blocked off by corporations in the era of Instagram, twitter and TikTok. An interesting approach persists: browser extensions that insert themselves in between the imposed design and its reception, allowing live modifications. But what does it say on a political level to fork from the mainstream usages, creating our own alternative bubble? Website fabulations proposes story telling, commenting, critiquing, improving accessibility, transforming websites into a poetic medium and creating collective fictions.

We will be working with scratch (named both after the practice of DJ scratching, and ’scratching the surface’ to reach the code of the webpage), a browser extension crafted for Declarations (a research on the materiality of the CSS web-language). Scratch allows to append an etherpad as a CSS stylesheet on one or multiple websites. Those changes can be viewed by the users of the extension and if you have the extension installed, you can also edit the css on the pad.

We’ll create website fabulations that could be: a web where you see only one DOM element at time, a web where every interaction makes sounds, a web where the weather influences its looks, a web that scrolls in other directions than top to bottom, a web where images are all in one spot, etc.

If you are interested to join, please contact: imane@constantvzw.org.
A knowledge of css or coding is not required for this workshop.

The workshop takes place on the 6th and 7th of September 2024 at Constant’s studio, Jetsesteenweg 388 Chaussée de Jette, 1081 Brussels.

Programme

Friday 6 september 2024 between 10h to 17h
– > From 10h to 12h30, artist Doriane Timmermans will introduce the research project Declarations.
Then we’ll share short stories about browsing the web: things we like or dislike, frictions and wonders.
– > From 14h to 17h, after showing how the extension works, we’ll divide in smaller groups and spend the afternoon discussing fabulations on website.

Saturday 7 september 2024 between 10h to 17h
– > From 10h to 12h30, we’ll continue working in group, trying to implement such modification through the scratching extension by collectively writing CSS (and a bit of javascript if desired). Before lunch we’ll do a tour in order to show each others what we did, as a collective learning and what it’s like to modify a website you didn’t design.
– > From 14h to 17h, we’ll help each other polishing our remixes, and document our intervention inside of the extension, and the stories that goes with them.

Lunch, coffees and teas will be provided.