Doriane is a developer, designer and artist, with a particular interest in the crafts of designing with language. She likes to think about systems and automatised processes as sensible media. She loves to create weirdly shaped tools that question our ways of doing. She is part of Open Source Publishing since 2021, where she makes websites, conversations and experiment with the blurry edges of HTML & CSS as a poetic medium and textual material.

Declarations is a research into the poetic materiality of the CSS web-standard (Cascading Style Sheets) and its echoes on design and artistic practices. Declarations is a love letter to the crafts of shaping with language.
Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) is part of the ground matter of websites, with HTML (HyperText Markup Language) and JavaScript. We could say that HTML creates the objects, CSS gives them shape, and JavaScript allows them to activate. It tells to the apparatus of web-technology how the elements of a web- document should present themselves and flow. Today, everyone who interacts with technology has to go through a layer of CSS: on every website, social network, app. It is also used outside of the screen to produce printed documents as an alternative publishing practice.
The research starts from an observation of alternative gestures using CSS in ways that deviate from the classic design industry. Rooted in transdisciplinarity, it gathers internet artists, alternative designers, hacking developers, and makers of handmade websites. It investigates the power dynamics, as well cultural and political positioning at play in the evolution of the standard. It uses artistic gestures to apprehend CSS ambiguous nature as both a language and a material, and how its declarative paradigm has hybridized design practices. It explores how by creating form through language, CSS articulates intentions, and encodes narratives in design, while creating visual cultures and folklores.