The Declarative Beauty Salon

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The Declarative Beauty Salon
Name The Declarative Beauty Salon
Location Het Wilde Weg
Date 2024/07/20
Time 10:00—13:00
PeopleOrganisations Karl Moubarak, Sohyeon Lee
Type HDSC2024
Web Yes
Print No

22 DeclaritiveBeautySalon.png

The activity proposes to explore the materiality, performativity and declarativeness of the CSS web-styling language by means of responding to prompts related to the CSS web-standard by doing our hair, make-up and nails all together while writing CSS and discussing together.

This activity is proposed as part of the Declarations series of workshops for the Summer Camp: https://declarations.style/hd-activity-proposal.html

  • duration: 3hrs in total

Welcome to the Declarative Beauty Salon! In this booth, we explore in an open-ended way the syntactic materiality, performativity, and declarativeness of the CSS web-styling language. Upon arrival to your appointment, you are prompted with a question related to the CSS web-standard. With all materials available to you, computer at-hand and lips ready for gossip, we invite you to answer the prompts by doing your make-up, nails, hair and discussing with others. By all means, feel free to throw the CSS web-standard out the window as this is a space for experiment, de-standardization and play. It is encouraged to break all the "rules" and swim against the mono-cultural currents of the World Wide Web Consortium. Make-up, hair care, and CSS professionals will be on premises to support you. Don't forget to make an appointment! (NO WALK-INs!)

Possible Prompts

  • Is web-design like fashion design?
  • Where is the sky of a website?
  • What are your default browser styles (when you don't want to make an effort or big statement)? When you don't feel you're expressing yourself in term of fashion, are you under useragentstylesheet?
  • What is Normcore as fashion aesthetic? and what is default (zero-CSS) browser aesthetic? is it a style?
  • What *-core trend fits you most? Cottage-Core? Hardcore? Fem*core? Eco-core? Normcore? Core-Core?
  • How important are global consortium standards for accessibility? How much do they achieve?
  • What is your favourite CSS property? What does it look like as a nails? Makeup? A hairstyle?
  • What and/or where is your home (page)?
  • What website annoyed you recently?
  • Handmade websites: what does it mean to handmake something?
  • Does website can be a park?

...and so on, we are open to share other web-design gossips!


Karl Moubarak: As a digital maker, I design and develop on-and-offline platforms for connectivity and exchange. I collaborate with artists, collectives and cultural organizations to translate complex socio-political paradigms into digital, physical and hybrid infrastructures. Always working with Free Libre and Open Source software and hardware and centering interactivity, sustainability and accessibility as leading core values, the projects I am involved with try to present working prototypes of alternative relationships between society and technology.'

Sohyeon Lee is a designer based in Leipzig and Berlin. Defining ritual moments in everyday life extends her artistic practices. Working with text and images, she invites, shares, and publishes by jumping across physical (mostly printed) and non-physical (mostly online) layers. She focuses on the meanings/ways of the technologies we use every day life, how it is related to social and environmental contexts. So that as a designer or an artist, she's considering how to publish and invite people to the subject and open the discussion.