A workshop the 6th and 7th of september at Constant, where we explore browser extensions as a way of taking agency on already designed websites.
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A workshop the 6th and 7th of september at Constant, where we explore browser extensions as a way of taking agency on already designed websites.
If you are interested to join, please contact: imane@constantvzw.org. An indepth knowledge of CSS or coding is not required for this workshop, as we will provide basic ressources to play with.
The workshop takes place on the 6th and 7th of September 2024 at Constant’s studio, Jetsesteenweg 388 Chaussée de Jette, 1081 Brussels.
fabulations
Inspired by the notion of tactical design, we remix the web as a user-hacker, questionning our agency as individuals and collectivities on the web through story telling, commenting, critiquing, improving accessibilities, transforming websites into a poetic medium. It is an invitation to create cross-websites fictions applying new cascading stylesheets (CSS) simultaneously to every websites at once, or crafting your very own intimate browser extension.
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 politcal level to fork from the mainstream usages, creating our own alternative bubble?
Pictures below are from the same workshop done at Hackers & Designers summercamp 2024.
When facing the task to redesign the web in a small group, we quickly realize that the challenge is more about ourselves as individuals than about code and programming. Creating an extension used by a group of lets say 10 persons is a bit like a co-housing situation. To handle our common space we need some rules, we need to learn about each others, I can't repaint the wall in pink and decide to sleep in the kitchen just because i want to.
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. Scratch allows to append an etherpad as a CSS stylesheet on one or multiple websites. If you start writting CSS on the pad it will apply to every website at once, and for everyone who has the extension.
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.