The Website fabulations workshop exploreed website modifications as a way of taking agency on already designed websites. Inspired by the notion of ’tactical design’ (cf Nolwenn Maudet), we remixed the web as a user-hacker, questioning our agency as individuals and communities 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 proposed story telling, commenting, critiquing, improving accessibility, transforming websites into a poetic medium and creating collective fictions.

The participants worked 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 project that researches the materiality of the CSS web-language). Scratch allowed to append an etherpad as a CSS stylesheet on one or multiple websites. Those changes could be viewed by the users of the extension and if you had the extension installed, you could also edit the css directly on the pad.

We created ’website fabulations’ that could be: a web where you saw only one DOM element at time, a web where every interaction made sounds, a web where the weather influenced its looks, a web that scrolled in other directions than top to bottom, a web where images were all in one spot, etc.

A knowledge of css or coding was not required for this workshop.
The workshop took place on the 6th and 7th of September 2024 at Constant’s studio.

Programme in detail

Friday 6 September 2024 between 10:00 and 17:00
– > From 10:00 to 12:30, artist Doriane Timmermans introduced the research project Declarations.
Then the participants shared short stories about browsing the web: things we liked or disliked, frictions and wonders.
– > From 14:00 to 17:00, after showing how the extension worked, the participants divided in smaller groups and spent the afternoon discussing fabulations on website.

Saturday 7 September 2024 between 10:00 and 17:00
– > From 10:00 to 12:30, the participants continued 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 they did a tour in order to show each others what they did, as a collective learning and what it was like to modify a website you didn’t design yourself.
– > From 14:00 to 17:00, the participants helped each other polishing our remixes, and document our intervention inside of the extension, and the stories that went with them.

Lunch, coffee and tea were provided.