3n Design

I recently participated in a Workshop  “Censored Online, Thriving Offline” led by Maisa Imamović and hosted by rip_space. 

This was the workshop description:

In response to increasing censorship, surveillance, and state-sanctioned silence, we will explore how to build resilient, offline-first websites. We will imagine and dwell in the the world without the internet – not by accident, but by design. What kind of websites emerge from severing our dependence on the cloud? Can we resist extraction, evade moderation, and exist without permission? Together, we’ll create web worlds that function as tools for survival, memory, rage, and community. Then, from the shadows of the offline archive, we’ll design a public-facing online teaser — the polished, the ambiguous, the safe-looking. By hiding truths and exposing lies via web design, participants will learn how the medium is a battleground of and tool for both: falsehood and resistance.

This made me think about the age verification laws popping up across the US, and how they might impact individual artist websites that hosted artworks that conservatives could target as inappropriate. If an artists work featured a lot of nudity, and went over the 33% mark most of the laws feature, would they be required to age verify, or censor themselves?

I used an artwork of mine, We can’t take it all with us, done in collaboration with artist rafa esparza, that lives on my website now and could be considered inappropriate.

Using the JS that Maisa Imamović developed to toggle visibility of specific elements depending on whether the user was online, I modified to it to add/remove a class censored so that images would be blurred and a notification displayed. Then when the user goes offline and is just experiencing the local loaded version, the censorship disappears.

Obviously this would not be a real solution, and the artwork I chose is barely inappropriate, but it was an opportunity to question what might be in the future for artist websites.