Restoration / Regeneration

the New Media Caucus Symposium

March 6-8, 2026

Arizona State University

Hand-Coding as Restoration: Reclaiming the Web One Site at a Time

11:15AM to 1:15PM
Duration: 2 hr

Description

This workshop reimagines web design as a restorative practice, teaching participants to reclaim digital space from commodified platforms by hand-coding their own websites. In an era where our online presence is mediated through corporate algorithms and engagement metrics, the act of building a personal site from scratch becomes both a creative and political gesture—one that centers individual agency and authentic community connection. Workshop goals include learning foundational HTML/CSS to build a simple personal webpage, understanding the historical shift from the personal web to platform dominance, publishing a live website and connecting with other participants through a collaborative webring, and exploring how hand-coding can be an act of digital restoration and community regeneration. The workshop begins with a brief lecture (15 minutes) framing the commodification of online space and the restorative potential of the personal web, webrings, and decentralized networks. The majority of the session (70 minutes) is dedicated to hands-on building, where participants hand-code their own website using HTML/CSS. I'll provide live coding demonstrations and templates while circulating to offer individual support. This is the heart of the workshop—a meditative, empowering process of creating digital space on your own terms. Following this, participants spend time (25 minutes) publishing their sites using free hosting platforms like Neocities or GitHub Pages and exchanging URLs, manually linking to each other to form an organic webring—a living network born from the workshop itself. The session concludes with a group reflection (10 minutes) on what it felt like to build outside platform constraints and how this practice might extend beyond the workshop. Participants leave with a live website, foundational coding skills, connections to a new digital community, and a tangible experience of restoration through making.

Artists

emily d'achiardi

University of California, Santa Barbara