Declarations is an ongoing artistic research project into the poetic materiality of the CSS web-standard and its echoes on design and artistic practices.
What is CSS ?
CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) tells browsers, phones, apps, computers, eBooks, some printed books, desktop environments, receipts and smartwatches how information is displayed. It declares how text flows, spaces are divided, typography is materialised and different planes are layered. It takes care of color, sizing, depth, movement, animation, responsiveness and (to some extent) accessibility. Every "sentences" of the CSS language is called a declaration.
CSS is a declarative programming language, meaning it "expresses the logic of a computation without describing its control flow". Programming languages that we most often use and quote aren't declarative, but imperative: we precise explicit steps for the program to execute, called algorithms - like a recipe. Here we don't explicit algorithm, but we declare (or describe) the outcome directly.
Because of its declarative nature, CSS uses the flexibility of natural language to design for both devices from the past or yet to be imagined: CSS suggest how things should be, but is always ready to "break gracefully" depending on the specificity of the context that is performing it. In her video essay Why Is CSS So Weird? (2019), Miriam Suzanne presents how this declarativeness is specific to the complex technology that is the web: to design for "a multitude of unknown canvases", CSS answers that we have to "accept to give up control" and embrace the ambiguity of declarativeness.
"I believe every material has a grain, including the web. But this assumption flies in the face of our expectations for technology. Too often, the internet is cast as a wide-open, infinitely malleable material."
— Frank Chimero, The Web's Grain (2015)
However, for practitioners in the field of design, its singularities as a material are often taken for granted or forgotten as some kind of technical or purely functional artifact that we have to accept. The research will use artistic gestures in order to talk about CSS ambiguous nature and bring it somewhere else than from it's purely functional technicalities.
Articulations of form and content
Laurel Schwulst explains with metaphors the essence of HTML, CSS & JS.
As much as metaphor are cool to understand and manipulate ideas, it is good to stay critical of boundaries like that.
“But what are we supposed to separate exactly? From the meticulous documentation of the discussions that led to the development of CSS, it seems that not much time has been spent on discussing the choice of the word pairs 'substance' versus 'form', their later equivalent 'content' and 'style', or even more outrageous, 'meaning' and 'presentation'. The ease with which the various working groups are able to put such porous concepts to use as binary oppositions, is not surprising coming out of the bureaucratic culture of the W3C.”
— Femke Snelting, Dividing and Sharing (2008).
Web design is an articulation of form and content. The interplay between what is form and what is content escapes this division forced by what these languages claim to do.
Can HTML be written to create form? is an idea that has been long explored in net art, but can we reciprocally: write CSS that becomes content?, that is to say forms shaped out of words with meaning so strong in our perceptive realm that they articulate a new story about what is at stake on a page.
What we research ?
Shift to language
We inspect a shift in design practices emerging from the nature of the web: as it is made of text, designing become writing. This fundamentally differentiates it from other design paradigms that imposed themselves as the normative way to publish with software (namely Adobe software). We no longer place elements or delimit spaces with gesture but with words.
"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 Schwultz, My website is a shifting house next to a river of knowledge. What could yours be? (2018)
As with every standard, it would be naive to ignore the power dynamics that are at play here. Technical decisions lead to cultural impact, we can only imagine how the choices of what words makes it to the CSS standard could have redefined our attention and perception, even outside of the space of the screen.
From that wondering lots of other questions followed
- How designing with language has changed design practices?
- How the malleability of language is used to dialogue with web (and unknown) technologies?
- What new methods are needed to approach CSS that acknowledge its duality as a literary and visual material?
- Similarly to the choice of words we decide to use to tell a story, how can declarative design speak about our intentions, and encodes narrations into the things we make?
- What are the power dynamics, as well cultural positioning, at play in the CSS standard? Who are the actors of this political ecosystem and what are their motivations?
- How to learn from the historical divergences of opinions on the CSS standard, and to see how artistic gestures could enter in dialogue with its evolution.
To perform the session in a common physical space, a step away from our individual and non-oralised relation to technology. Discussing the language of CSS aloud can become a process to perform its linguistic nature and declarativeness.
Transdisciplinary craft
The research decides to focus on CSS from an observation: seeing an ensemble of spread, alternative gestures that revolve around CSS, in ways that deviate from the standardized web and design industry, and where its role seems to escape from a purely technical position. Those diagonal CSS-based practices gather internet artists, alternative designers, hacking developers, and makers of handmade websites.
"I want our personalities to come through not just in the words or links we share, but in the URLS we use and the code we write."
— Zach Mandeville, Basic HTML Competency Is the New Punk Folk Explosion!
However CSS is still too often approached as a mean, putting its materiality and specificity aside. Moreover the occasions to discuss CSS are constrained: either by discipline (already suffering from the designer versus developer separation), or by the format (highly limited to teaching design or online code tutorials), while webcrafting invoke language, poetry, politics, technology, culture and design.
"But what are we supposed to separate exactly? From the meticulous documentation of the discussions that led to the development of CSS, it seems that not much time has been spent on discussing the choice of the word pairs 'substance' versus 'form', their later equivalent 'content' and 'style', or even more outrageous, 'meaning' and 'presentation'. The ease with which the various working groups are able to put such porous concepts to use as binary oppositions, is not surprising coming out of the bureaucratic culture of the W3C."
— Femke Snelting, Dividing and Sharing (2008).
Declarations aims to bring together a network of Declarative artistist and Web-artisans, by creating moments where practitioners can cross paths in a transdisciplinary artistic environment. Transdisciplinarity in the research is both a political and social choice as it is a mean to constantly shift our views. Declarations starts a process of documenting and collectivizing knowledge on the alternative crafts of CSS.
"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 (2015)
What are the current tracks ?
scrapping CSS as a material to analyze: collecting style as content, language analysis on stylesheets, anti-standard validator systems.
scratching CSS as a tactical tool: browser-extension for user-hacker, tactical design and fictions from the bottom.
telling CSS as a performative medium: telling a website declarations by declarations, as a story.
translating CSS as symbols: on metaphors and cultural embedding used in the standards and on the web.
reflecting CSS as paradigms: exploring other field that use declarativeness to transform the self, like fashion, or role-playing.
crafting CSS as a fragile craft: pushing our hands into its word-like materiality to explore its grain.
How is the research coordinated ?
Coordinator
Doriane is the research coordinator (best word i ended up with), meaning I wrote a dossier proposal, nourrished by my own practices and the ones of my peers, and now I play this game-master-like role of gathering, proposing and setting up.
I am a developer, designer and artist, with a particular interest in the crafts of designing with language. I am part of Open Source Publishing since 2021, where I makes websites, conversations and experiment with the blurry edges of HTML & CSS as a poetic medium and textual material. Since 2023, I coordinate an artistic research on CSS and the crafts of designing with language, called Declarations.
FRArt
At first Declarations was a proposal/application for the FRArt 2023 (Fond de Recherche en Art), who subsidize artistic research. I guess artistic research can be a lot of thing, but in our case I see it as:
- the art part implies that it isn't bound to designer, web developer or one singular practices, but that it reads web-language from a transversal, transdisciplinary, point of view.
- the research part implies that I mainly comes with questions to explore together, and there is no specific production, no expected form, to answer those questions.
Time
In the research proposal, it was divided in three parts.
| from December 2023 | Companion tools | @OSP |
| from April 2024 | Worksession | @Constant |
| from November 2024 | Worksession | @??? |
The first one was motivated by a need for tools to research. I formulated those tools as the companions tools, because they don't have a precise something to solve, they're just there as companions we can use in different situations.
Can I participate ?
Yes! Declarations is organising worksession through open call, and other events. To keep it with the latest news, you can subscribe to the mailing list.
You are also welcome to explore our gitlab group, where we post experimental browser-extensions, and declarative web poetry.
If this research inspire you a project, an experiment or an event, you are welcome to share it at doriane@ungual.digital. We can add it together to the observatory tab and see how it echoes to other weirdly shaped tentative here and there.