Declarations is an ongoing artistic research project into the poetic materiality of the CSS web-standard and its visual-political-cultural echoes on design-artistic practices and our daily lives. Declarations is a love letter to the crafts of designing with language.
A workshop at Offline in Berlin on stylesheets as ambiguous documents: they're declaring visual spaces but also standalone literary pieces or tools. We not only style publishing but also publish style. A workshop at Offline in Berlin on stylesheets as ambiguous documents: they declare visual but are also literary pieces on their own, we not only style publishing but also publish style.
Well Gedacht Publishing is hosting a two-day workshop with the research group Declarations on the 24th and 25th of January between 11-18:00 at Offline, Lichtenrader Str. 49, 12049 Berlin.
Early web publishing platforms like Geocities, Myspace, or Tumblr gave their users tools for customization. Contemporary platforms like X, Instagram, and TikTok have limited and homogenized the format and shape of the content. If websites are “an articulation of form and content,” the interplay between those two concepts breaks out of the idea that the visual/interactive outcome of publishing can be “solved by experts” into framework-induced smooth templated spaces.
In this workshop, helped by a custom DIY browser extension and open-source tools, we inspect online publishing platforms and question our agency as individuals and collectivities on the web through storytelling, commenting, critiquing, degrading, improving, and transforming websites into a poetic medium. Style sheets are ambiguous documents: they're declaring visual spaces, but they can also be seen as standalone literary pieces or tools. By claiming back this layer of customization, we not only style publishing but also publish style—by making our style sheet an available hosted document, a companion to the HTML page.
“My favorite aspect of websites is their duality: they're both subject and object at once. In other words, a website creator becomes both author and architect simultaneously.”
— Laurel Schwulst, My website is a shifting house next to a river of knowledge. What could yours be? (2018)
“In today's highly commercialized web of multinational corporations, proprietary applications, read-only devices, search algorithms, Content Management Systems, WYSIWYG editors, and digital publishers it becomes an increasingly radical act to hand-code and self-publish experimental web art and writing projects.”
— J. R. Carpenter, A Handmade Web (2012)
The workshop will be facilitated by Doriane Timmermans, Clara Pasteau, and Vinciane Dahéron. Please bring your laptops and digital publishing ideas such as texts, sketches, image collections, etc. Prior CSS knowledge is not required, although some basic knowledge would help you to get through. There will be breaks in between and food for lunch. Participation is free of charge; places are limited.
Post-Platform Digital Publishing Toolkit is a project exploring how to overcome the limitations of digital publishing today, on social media or elsewhere online, and aims to advocate self-hosting methods for artists and artists' book publishers. All graphic design in this project is done by Fadi Houmani. Stay tuned for the launch of our project wiki. PPDPT is funded by the Berlin Senate Department of Culture's Innovation Fund for Digital Development of the Cultural Sector.