Folder Party Party
What if visiting a website felt like having your friends over? What kind of gathering would you host? Part-workshop, part-crafting, this session will prompt you to use your computer as a gathering place.
Folder Party Party is a part-workshop, part-crafting event for social website-making. During this session, we'll dive into our computer hard drives to explore the digital ephemera we accumulate and talk about personal data practices.
Together, we'll curate folders on our computers to share with each other and turn them into spatial websites full of rearrangeable furniture and decor. We'll use a tool I've built that lets you easily turn a folder of files into a website without needing to know any code.
Expect open time to reflect and craft a folder party website, as well as time to explore other people's sites. No specific coding experience is required, but you'll want to be comfortable downloading tools for running Node.js (JavaScript) on your computer and executing commands in a terminal.
Program
Part one: a few prompts to think about your computer as a gathering place
Part two: dive into your filesystem to gather materials for your folder party
Part three: choose your furniture, customize your theme, and generate a website
Part four: share your folder party and explore others'
Facilitator
Lizz Thabet is an artist and programmer excited about homemade internets and technology skill-share. Her work touches interactive software, open-source tools, skill-share workshops, wearable costumes, and strange drawings. Tinkering with digital networks is a way for her to build personal and social practices of computing, as well as invest in alternative infrastructures that are both material and ideological.
Over the past few years, Lizz has given workshops and written guides for creative communities on self-hosting websites using privacy-centric tools. They approach teaching as a way to do ideas out loud with others and orient their work towards investing in forms of collective power rather than individual ethical choice.
In their day job, Lizz builds tools for other programmers with an eye towards open-source projects and accessible websites.