Bookmarklet Instruments: A Workshop by Chia Amisola
Let's turn the browser from a passive, endless feed into an active instrument and performance for poetic expression and utility.
We'll explore 'bookmarklets', lightweight Javascript tools that live in the bookmark's bar that let you manipulate, modify, and reimagine any webpage you visit. Instead of a website as a fixed experience, we'll learn how to overlay our own interventions, transforming how we read, see, and interact with the web in real-time.
Together, we'll learn how to use a collection of poetic and utilitarian bookmarklets that modify webpages. We'll consider how browsing can be slower, contemplative, or fun, chaotic, and expressive, or better serve our own needs—turning the web into the vast, open, and malleable environment. In practice, we'll figure out what 'browsing' means, and how it can be a form of performance.
Through live demonstrations and guided experimentation, you'll discover how these simple tools can highlight every third word, shuffle paragraphs, fade distractions, or apply unexpected filters—each acting as a different "instrument" for playing the web. By the end of this workshop, you'll have a personalized toolkit of bookmarklets that you can useand understand the creative potential of these browser-based interventions for cultivating more intentional, poetic relationships with online content.
Learning outcomes:
Add and use bookmarklets, exploring different use cases from poetics & art to utility & gathering
Learn how to prompt your own bookmarklets for any website, or for a specific website
Understand how bookmarklets work as creative interventions and identify ways to customize or combine them
Experiment with multiple bookmarklet instruments (textual, visual, structural) through hands-on browsing exercises
This is an online event. The session will be recorded. Materials and recordings will be sent after the workshop to registered participants, and will then be posted online to the public after a further ~6 month delay.
This event is part of Developh's 2025 Rainy Season Talks series, focusing on workshops that center creative and critical practices around technology.
Donate to the workshop
If you have the capacity to donate to Developh, these are our suggested workshop fees:
Philippines: 250-600 PHP
Outside the Philippines: 15-25 USD
Donations may be made at paypal.me/developh or via GCash to the number in this link.
If you cannot donate due to financial circumstances, limited slots are available for free. Input '0' at registration until available.
About the artist
Chia Amisola is an internet artist, Product Designer at Figma, and Executive Director of Developh. Their websites, performances, games, and tools explore the identities, intimacies, and infrastructures of the web, particularly from the third world experience. They are based between Manila and New York.
amiso.la
About Developh
Developh is an arts & research institution nurturing critical and creative technologies, working towards a more archipelagic internet. As a community of practice, we gather, publish, research, and create to reclaim technology as a tool for liberation rather than oppression. Our activations concern the online, offline, and in-between.