User:Kiara/Second Assessment

Past

Special Issue 25: Sounds of Making

Context

In collaboration with Radio WORM we hosted radio shows for 2 months and crafted projects relating to sound.

One of the shows I took part in was Lost Music; together with Chrissy, Charlie, Tessa and Imina we collected songs from our classmates, following different instructions. We decided to burn CDs with the songs on them and to make a website to allow people to download the songs without needing any music-streaming platform. The whole project took great visual inspiration in late 90s - early 2000s aesthetics. The website itself is inspired by tumblr blogs that allowed autoplay music when anyone would enter the website.

Lost in Narration is the final project I took part in, where we put together a looping chain of discourse:

(2 narrators) write the script 
                 ↓ 
(2 speakers) read the script into microphones 
                 ↓
read material is captured by a speech-to-text python script 
+ printed by a receipt printer
+ simultaneously transformed into sound, captured by VCV Rack 2

The idea was to have a never-stopping live scripting, that acts as a (fictional) archive of the Special Issue's public event and to play with language as a material.

Key concepts I take from it

• small web/indie web (hand coded),
• open access, piracy as a sharing method
• connection between the body and the code and how they invest space(s)
• failure as a creative material / trial and error (the python script doesn't fully recognises the words, depending on accent, dictation, etc.)
• language intricacies, interpretation, translation, intention (what you mean is not necessarily what will be understood)

Links: Lost_in_Narration --- SI 25 website --- https://hub.xpub.nl/cerealbox/~kiara/lost-music/

Special Issue 26: Display & Position

Context

in collaboration with artist and researcher Doriane Timmermans, we spent 3 months working on CSS manipulation, with a specific focus on the display and position properties. This Special Issue was integrated as part of her https://declarations.style research project, focusing on the materiality and poetry of the CSS language.

Key concepts I take from it

• CSS as a language, before being a programming language --> syntax, meaning, vocabulary, etc.
• Code as a creative writing material
• Web programming as a craft
• Interpretation, subjectivity

Links: User:Kiara/Special_Issue_26 --- Specific Lens: browser extension --- Supervisual Hyperzine: an archive of SI26 --- https://declarations.style

External works

My own practice of web crafting

Since 5 years now I have been playing around with web languages, mostly HTML and CSS, to create web material but also printed objects. I learn constantly, as it is an ever-evolving practice.

Looking back at my own work, some key concepts keep being present:

• playfulness
• puzzle/enigma aspect
• language

So I safely assume that they will also exist in the project I am now working on...

Links: https://kirayana.codeberg.page/reves-party/ --- https://kirayana.codeberg.page/babel --- https://kiarajou.gitlab.io/feed-your-head/

Present

Investigation (thesis)

    ⇣----  Magic  ----⇣
body & politics & resistance
    ⇡---- The web ----⇡

Starting point
I started by considering working on topics revolving around community, collaboration and such, but this axis was missing something. It was at the same time too broad, hard to narrow down and too restrictive. It was most importantly lacking the things that drive me as a person: language and magic.

Magic

Magic is a concept that has been present in my life for as long as I can remember. From a childhood passion for magical girls, witches and fairies to a deeper understanding of what magic implies in a broader sense. From all that personal experience, I outline my own definition of magic:

It all starts with intuition: that feeling we have deep inside that makes us say "it does (not) feel right". That intuition, that also involves hunches or déjà-vu sensations is rooted within our inner self, the understanding of our feelings and emotions and how we relate and deal with them.
What we do with this intuition leads to the second key aspect of magic: intention. Where you place intention, and if you place it, in order to (in)validate your intuition. Do you listen to that little voice telling you something has to be dug out there? Do you follow it? What paths do you take to follow it?
Obviously, magic is highly subjective, it relates strongly to our individuality and how we choose to express it. This is also part of what makes it appear so ungraspable and mystical.
Magic lies in the in-betweens, those places we cannot fully reach or make sense of, but are actually existing. We can feel their existence. It is what you cannot touch but can only sense.
So far, that definition is very mental, very inwards-focused. Let me elaborate on the physical side of it, as it cannot be separated since we are both body and mind.
Magic in a western-oriented imaginary will induce pictures of spell-casting, magic wands, potion making and such practices that involve, require even, a body interaction. I said before that magic is what you cannot touch, but everything happens through physical channels. As intention cannot be expressed without action, we somehow have to "perform" magic. Here, I do not want to focus on occult and mystique practices, but more on the mundane actions we take.
It is those actions that bring the magic forward: how we decide to create something, care for it, share it to others, how we interact with others. Through actions, gesture, body expression, we influence the world around us as much as we get influenced by it. By shaping the world, we shape ourselves, and vice-versa.
To tie a more precise connection between the spiritual and the physical aspect of that definition, I invoke the ritual: a practice that is shaped both in the physical (ritual dances, sacrifices, (magic) circles, etc.) and in the spiritual (writings such as spells or chants, sigils, etc.)
Lastly, we shouldn't forget the ties magic has to politics: many contexts and stories tell about magic practitioners (especially women) being chased, punished, banished from societies for their way of living would not comply with the "official" system and its rules. As a matter of fact, we also can observe magic practices rising mostly amongst discriminated circles: women, queer people, people of colour, etc. Magic has often served as a counter-culture, a way of reclaiming power and fighting the system. (NEED EXAMPLE!!!!)

The web

Example of hyperlink structure

Screenshot from https://sigil-seance.diagram.institute/ showing a sigil

The web has been my main playground for years, for that reason it is at the heart of my graduation project and research. I want to investigate the web under two prisms:

• As a space: allowing for creation, expression, community building
• As a craft material: focusing on its languages (HTML + CSS) and creative intentions (as in: why people craft websites or something like that)

Through that investigation, I seek to answer several hunches that started this research:

• the web has something magical (that is beyond simple amazement)
• hyperlinks are magical (a hunch reinforced by Charlie's correspondence between hyperlink structure and sigils)
• connecting back to the craft of the web (hand coded websites) would allow to reconnect to ourselves (through intention and learning + doing things with our hands >> reconnecting body and mind) and thus to fight back

The web is equally political, it was built on a political stance: sharing knowledge globally through an open access network system (the internet). Since then, activists of all convictions have been using it as a tool to reach and/or create communities and movements. We can very much see it when any kind of election is happening, we lost count of the campaigns that have been suspected of treachery through online actions, of politicians campaigning on TikTok, etc.

Politics & Resistance

We are currently witnessing a rise of fascism in a global political context and that comes along with a rise of AI generated content, seamlessness, extreme smoothness and all automation. Those concepts all feed on each other, as shows this are.na channel by The Institute of Diagram Studies.
In that context and given the high political involvement of both magic and the web, my aim is to uncover practices and methods to fight back and reclaim the web space by highlighting the craft of website making. This is all a bit vague for now, because the investigation is ongoing.
As part of my investigation, I intend to take generative AI as a case study, debunking its fake magic aura; I will focus on my own interpretation of it as stage magic: if AI is "magical" it is merely a trick on the mind, making its audience believe something is happening when it actually is a smokescreen. If its "magic" comes from the fact that "we do not quite understand what it does and how", in opposition a hand crafted website therefore acts as a counter-spell, by the fact that we can inspect, replicate and adapt it, thus understanding it and our own intentions.

Body & Language

1. Body

With resistance, comes the intervention of our physical beings.
The body has its own language, Luna Maurer highlights that through dancing: machines cannot dance, it is a truly human activity; dance depicts who we are by the expression of body movement. Moreover, dancing requires a specific writing technique (choreography), which might resemble a script, or even a ritual.
When we resist, we resist by taking action, literally: you stop going to a specific store because it finances a genocide, you stop taking the plane or taking baths to reduce your carbon footprint, you go out on the street to protest, etc.
Resisting on the web is much similar: crafting a website involves both the mind (intention of making) and the body (actually coding the website, navigating it).
I want to explore that part of web crafting that involves the body. How to connect the act of coding to the body, how do we invest our body when we code a website? What part(s) of the body are involved (besides the HTML body, hehe).

2. Language

Language is a shared component of every one of those topics:

• Magic: ritual, incantation, formulation (of intention), spell, even sigils are based off of words;
• Web: programming languages, actual written content of a website;
• Politics & Resistance: chants, slogan, catchphrases, etc.

This allows to draw connections:

• Crafting a website requires intuition, intention, action. It results in a sort of ritual:
  • write HTML
  • style with CSS
  • make corrections
  • publish
• Which then involves another hunch I want to investigate: CSS rituals, or how CSS bears magical aspects. This idea is highly supported by Miriam Suzanne, member of the CSS working group, and by Doriane Timmermans, who both gave me extremely valuable input on this matter during conversations I had with them.
  

In a nutshell, I intend to explore the shapes of languages: ritual/spell/incantation language; "human" language; web languages to eventually find similarities and connections that support my point.

In a nutshell: research question

Through all those interrelated topics, my central question is:

How does cultivating the handmade web gives us leverage against the all-automation?

This is a question that probably needs refining, or a different phrasing, but the idea is to highlight web crafting practices as a means to fight back against automation, AI-generated content and fascism.
In order to answer that question, I intend to divide my writing into 4 key aspects:

• Introduction: what are we talking about?
  • Definitions of key terms and their relation to one another
• 1. The web is not dying, its alchemy is just in the wrong hands
  • Result of an investigation into the similarities between the web and alchemy + the ones between hyperlinks and sigils
• 2. The descent into oblivion seamlessness
  • Cultural appropriation and glamorisation: how "ruling systems" turn struggle response into smoothed out aesthetics
  • Case study: debunking generative AI as "the new magic"
• 3. Take the power back
  • Showcasing web practices that counter-act ruling systems and link them to magic practices with the same aim to highlight interrelations

In that investigation, I aim to not fall into stereotypical traps such as full-on binary or preconceptions. For that, I will need to offer a thorough and precise glossary and list of examples.
The glossary is in its most primal shape above, it is being refined constantly.
Here is a start of the examples list:

• https://melonking.net

Future

The project

My project's aim is to place the body, the physical as a central element. Thanks to the investigation led for the written research, I should uncover and draw inspiration from a range of practices that involve the body into the craft of the web (so far, I think about Olia Lialina's Summer, or hosting a no computer web crafting workshop) or the materiality of the code.
I am not yet sure about the form of that project, but I know what it will not be:

it will not be a performance

it will not be "just" a website

it will not be an archive

it might (not) be a collection of workshops that all end with a zine creation about the workshop itself (meta)

I wish to use this project as a way of stepping out of my comfort zone: my first instinct was a website involving some CSS-print functionalities. These are exactly what I always go for. I'd like to uncover new possibilities.

Ideally, of course, the project will have a political stance.

Prototypes

In order to frame the project and the research better, I started some prototypes:

✺ Invoke the web (from last year)

Exercise during methods class: write an answer or alternative version of a text read and annotated during the past weeks. I had read Joan Carpenter's "Handmade web" together with Sevgi and we agreed 1) that the text looks like a recipe or a spell and 2) that the part where she is supposed to talk about the body is not extensive nor very relevant. So I made a parody of her text that takes the spell literally and sums up every paragraph in a very reduced almost narrow-minded way, to highlight some absurdities made by the author (subjectively). https://hub.xpub.nl/cerealbox/~kiara/methods/handmade-web/

✺ Talisman web gallery (in progress)

Inspired by my readings of SSTOBME: an essay on magic (Dukes, R.), 2000 and Talismans pour celles qui ne savent pas de quoi ils parlent (Haute, L.), 2020, I started a gallery of magical artifacts, starting with a CSS-only talisman. https://hub.xpub.nl/cerealbox/~kiara/GradPrototypes/02_Talismans/

✺ XPUB webring workshop

On November 3rd 2025, I hosted a workshop about webrings. We organised a fully magic morning together with Charlie, who first introduced the group to magic folklore, symbols and sigils. Drawing from that magic atmosphere, I invited everyone to build a webpage in 45mn about anything they wanted, with the indication that everything had to be hand coded, meaning no JavaScript generated HTML or external framework. The result is extremely diverse and rich: https://hub.xpub.nl/cerealbox/~kiara/magic-webring/

✺ Try Out Night - December 1st 2025

This was the first public moment of the year, for it I offered to visitors the possibility to wander in the webring, but also a way to express themselves and for me to gather material: I displayed cards on which I asked people to put down what "magic" brings to their minds. The aim was to collect spontaneous responses to enrich my own vision.

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