workshops:publish-style-style-publishing-info [Post-Platform Digital Publishing Toolkit]

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Well Gedacht Publishing is hosting a two-day workshop with the research group [[https://declarations.style|Declarations]] on the 24th and 25th of January between 11-18:00 at [[https://offline.place|offline]], Lichtenrader Str. 49, 12049 Berlin.

**Declarations** is an ongoing artistic research project into the CSS web standard's visual, poetic & linguistic materiality and its echoes on design and artistic practices.

CSS shapes with words, it can tell browsers, phones, apps, computers, eBooks, printed books, and desktop environments how information is displayed: how text flows, spaces are divided, typography is materialized, and different planes are layered. It takes care of color, sizing, depth, movement, animation, responsiveness, and (to some extent) accessibility. Every "sentence" of the CSS language is called a declaration.

**publish style ↻ style publishing**

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. 

This is the first of the two workshop series as part of the project "Post Platform Digital Publishing Toolkit," where we research and advocate the use of free/libre and open source software and more autonomous ways of digital publishing in a broader sense.

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 [[https://www.instagram.com/fadi.houmani/|Fadi Houmani]]. PPDPT is funded by the Berlin Senate Department of Culture's Innovation Fund for Digital Development of the Cultural Sector.