--- tags: Teaching, DC title: 'Digital Culture 2020 - interface détournement' link: https://hackmd.io/@siusoon/dc2020-id --- Ref: "Interface Détournemen," in The Techno-Galactic Guide to Software Observation, 156-161, (2018), https://www.books.constantvzw.org/nl/home/tgso. **==MX009==/group: Interface Détournement on the present web (a method developed by Loup Cellard)** ![](https://i.imgur.com/Kdkvd0F.png) Objectives: 1. To understand the architecture, design and the rhetoric language that have been used in contemporary web. 2. Using the approach of critical making to hack a web page. 3. To think about if the hacked web page is a form of Internet art. --- 1. Choose a particular web page where you want to intervene. You can pick an interface in relation to: * contestable content: bullshit slogans and jargon, problematic rhetoric, over-promized lies, unnecessary content that is interesting to reframe, etc. * problematic interface issues: unreadabillity, problems of orientation/disorientation, interaction design issues, etc. 2. Open the “developer tool” / Inspector (ctrl + shift + i on firefox/linux; opt + cmd + C on firefox/Mac) of your browser. With this tool you will be able to see the web structure, visualize and modify locally the content of your website (the html rendering) and the way it is styled (the css file). Watch this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z4-atsnk69w or read this: https://www.wikihow.com/Use-Inspect-Element-in-Mozilla-Firefox (How to use the DOM Inspector in Firefox) 3. Then you have to adopt a strategy of intervention guiding your détournement. Here is a list of proposed strategies: * The classical détournement: play with the interface content, replace textual elements, add others with a good dose of humour and irony. * The layout and template observation: study the interface layout by removing all the textual content. The layout will appear, after having done this exercise on several interfaces you will be able to compare the regularities between websites. Then feel free to move elements and reconstruct the interface the way you want. ![](https://i.imgur.com/KtlUNW3.jpg) 4. After having done your détournement, you can share the outcome of your work: present the new interface you have done just as if it was a mundane and “real” one. Take a screenshot of the original site, your hacked interface and make a short response on hackmd. (such as why you choose this site, what have you changed, and why you change that, is this a form of critical making? Is this Internet art? and what might be the current web?) ==note: record the steps and changes that you have made. Don't leave the page that you are editing until you are actually finished.==