Disobedient Web Design: Building Early Internet Digital Shrines
Join us for the workshop led by Maisa Imamović as part of Rip Space’s first school – Really Radical Return 2 School. Through tech and education, it aims to encourage and organize solidarity energies for the future.
About the Workshop:
The internet has become increasingly predictable and homogenized. Many contemporary websites primarily serve to cultivate unhealthy parasocial relationships and conform to an invisible aesthetic perimeter—an allegiance to a uniform, "smooth jazz"-like design sensibility. The era of idiosyncratic, "ugly" websites—handcrafted and passionately devoted to a single niche obsession—has largely disappeared. This workshop aims to reintroduce that spirit of creative disorder by flooding the internet with fan pages and digital shrines: a deliberate injection of dirty data to disrupt the sanitized web.
The session will begin with a brief presentation on the history and aesthetics of early fan sites and personal web pages, followed by a hands-on component where participants will build their own fan sites using hand-code or simple HTML templates. These projects will then be interconnected through a collaborative webring, offering an alternative vision for a decentralized, eccentric, and user-driven internet.
This class is hosted in collaboration with Rasheed’s experimental school of play, The Little Octopus School.
Experience level: Beginner to advanced
Requirements:
Cherish an obsession or hyperfixation you’d like to share with others (if you consider yourself an infodumper or engage in any other rituals of excess, spillage, indulgence, and curiosity)
Prepare a 1-minute lore about your obsession (something like rapid show and tell)
At least 10 digital objects (screenshots, audio clips, scans, text, etc.) you’d like to use for your website
Check out Laurel Schwulst’s poetic description of HTML and CSS
Computing device (we will only write in HTML and CSS; no Java; no machine-learning vibe coding)
Technologies:
Obsession
Curiosity
Yarn
Notebook
Writing Utensil
suggested donation $25-$40
* If cost is a barrier to participation, please feel free to reach out to vera@rip.space—we’re happy to accommodate *
** space is limited **
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Kameelah Janan Rasheed is a learner from East Palo Alto, CA. With over 25 years of experience in teaching, facilitation, and mentorship, her students and co-learners have nurtured her practice. She is a full-time instructor at the Yale School of Art in the Sculpture Department, where she facilitates the sculpture thesis course and publication; teaches studio and theory-based sculpture courses; and has designed a new course focused on text-based artists since the 1900s. Additionally, she has taught courses and workshops at the School for Poetic Computation focused on creative coding, experimental writing, surveillance, AI and non-AI powered text generators, and pedagogy. She has taught undergraduate and graduate students at Barnard College - Columbia University, Cooper Union, and the School of Visual Arts. Since 2022, Rasheed has co-taught a writing and publishing intensive to Bennington College (formally affiliated with the University of the Arts) MFA dance students at the Institut Chorégraphique International (International Choreographic Institute) summer conference in Montpellier, France. In 2025, she will be a visiting faculty at the Saas-Fee Summer Institute of Art.
ABOUT RIP SPACE: Co-founded by John Threat and Vera Petukhova in January 2024, and run in collaboration with Maisa Imamović, Rip Space is a radical exploratory hacker / new media art x tech space with an ambitious programming schedule. We operate out of a loft space in DTLA featuring a large transparent configurable LED screen that is an invitation for artist experimentation and collaboration – along with a growing media library of new and retro tech. Rip Space is dedicated to showcasing new media, digital art, installations, performance, and experiential and sensory work. The name RIP SPACE is a flip on WIP or work in process – RIP or riot in process is a space where process, ideation, and experimentation override product and finalization. Rip Space exhibitions and programs are created in collaboration and in process with artists. In addition to exhibiting artists' work, we also host artist talks, skill share workshops, community gatherings, screenings, symposiums and other discursive events. Rip Space operates under the fiscal sponsorship of Gray Area, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization, allowing us to receive tax-deductible donations and grants through their nonprofit status.