Disobedient Web Design: Building Early Internet Digital Shrines  


Time21 September 2025
Sunday, 2-5 EST; 3 hours  LocationRIP Space

1250 Long Beach Ave #326
Los Angeles, CA 90021CostFree.99
Ages18+
InstructorKameelah Janan RasheedEnrollment August - September 2025

Register    

   
Description 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 RIP Space

 
Experience 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

 
Resources

1. Wayback Exe: X/Twitter page that generates screenshots of old websites in old browsers using data from the Wayback Machine
2. Old Geocities Websites
   
3. Geocities Gallery
4. Digital Shrines: Why We Save Screenshots We'll Never Look At Again (Shrishti Das, July 2025)