The Wicked Witch of the World Wide Web is my master's thesis, written for the XPUB — Experimental Publishing course at the Piet Zwart Institute in Rotterdam (NL).
It all started with a hunch: the Web bears magic. To investigate that hunch, I had to go back into my personal practice and uncover a truth I’ve always been aware of, but that finally found its meaning. In every one of my works, 3 common aspects are always there: politics, language and playfulness. They are always intertwined and communicating, in one way or another. And I find the Web also involves those themes.
So I asked myself what is the glue that holds politics, language, playfulness, the Web and that touch of magic together. The answer is purpose.
My personal view of magic is ruled by intention: what will make one say certain words, act a certain way. That same intention should be, I believe, at
the core of website making. That same intention injects politics in things.
The state of the Web is currently unstable, taken over by big Silicon Valley corporation, pushing AI slop in everything, until we all become numb.This system is creating a great seamlessness, valuing templates
and drag-and-drop website makers instead of the craft of HTML and CSS. That is how we loose singularity and get lost in a virtual sea of grid-ruled websites. In addition, we’re always compelled and pushed to find purpose, to have a reason, a use for everything we say and make.
So let’s embrace the useless, the purposeless, for the sake of fun. As Johan Huizinga demonstrates in his book Homo Ludens, play is an inherent part of life and losing playfulness gives way to seriousness, leading to extreme political situations. Meaning that in order to fight those political crises, we need to embrace playfulness.
This research observes how playfulness can help us (re)shape the Web into a human-crafted space and counter machine-generated content and homogenisation.
Outline
images are coming soon :)
as the production costs (time and money) are high, you can email me to buy one