DOGME 95,000

DOGME 95,000 is a collection of web designers founded online in spring 2018.

DOGME 95,000 has the expressed goal of countering “certain tendencies” in web design today.

DOGME 95,000 is a rescue action!

In 2001 enough was enough! The web was dead and called for resurrection. The goal was correct but the means were not! The new wave proved to be a ripple that washed ashore and turned to muck.

Slogans of individualism and freedom created works for a while, but no changes. The wave was up for grabs, like the web designers themselves. The wave was never stronger than the men behind it. The anti-bourgeois web itself became bourgeois, because the foundations upon which its theories were based was the bourgeois perception of art. The auteur concept was bourgeois romanticism from the very start and thereby… false!

To DOGME 95,000 the web is not individual!

Today a technological storm is raging, the result of which will be the ultimate democratization of the web. For the first time, anyone can make websites. But the more accessible the medium becomes, the more important the avant-garde. It is no accident that the phrase “avant-garde” has military connotations. Discipline is the answer… we must put our websites into uniform, because the individual website will be decadent by definition!

DOGME 95,000 counters the individual websites by the principle of presenting an indisputable set of rules known as THE VOW OF CHASTITY.

In 2001 enough was enough! The web had been cosmeticized to death, they said; yet since then the use of cosmetics has exploded.

The “supreme” task of the decadent web designers is to fool the audience. Is that what we are so proud of? Is that what the “24 years” have brought us? Illusions via which emotions can be communicated?… By the individual artist's free choice of trickery?

Predictability (clean design) has become the golden calf around which we dance. Having the content justify the design is too complicated, and not “high art.” As never before, the superficial clean designs and the superficial websites are receiving all the praise.

The result is barren. An illusion of pathos and an illusion of love.

To DOGME 95,000 the web is not illusion!

Today a technological storm is raging of which the result is the elevation of cosmetics to God. By using new technology anyone at any time can wash the last grains of truth away in the deadly embrace of sensation. The illusions are everything the website can hide behind.

DOGME 95,000 counters the web design of illusion by the presentation of an indisputable set of rules known as THE VOW OF CHASTITY.

THE VOW OF CHASTITY

I swear to submit to the following set of rules drawn up and confirmed by DOGME 95,000:

  1. Websites must be hosted in a manner which gives the designer complete control, free from any outside aesthetic or content interventions. Standard hosting policies regarding hate speech (etc) are the only exception.
  2. All resources required for the site must be hosted locally (no embedding media, importing code from URLs, etc). Copying resources and hosting them locally is encouraged.
  3. The website must be built from scratch. WYSIWYG editors are permitted, but viewed unfavorably. Any design attainable in this way is acceptable.
  4. Template-based website builders and pre-existing CMS are forbidden (ie tumblr, Squarespace, Wordpress, etc). A hosting site’s web-based editor may be used only if you can (and do) start entirely from scratch.
  5. Low filesizes and data-efficient formats are encouraged... but ambitious content is celebrated above all else.
  6. “Under Construction” gifs, “Starry Night” backgrounds, and scrolling marquees are ideological markers which extend beyond aesthetics. (“A Vernacular Web,” Lialina, 2005)
  7. Every site must prominently display when it was last updated.
  8. When the movement is co-opted by the bourgeois, their efforts will be met with a collective shrug before we continue the party.
  9. The file format must be HTML.
  10. Web designers are free to remain anonymous, or identify themselves however they wish — handles are stronger than given names.

Furthermore I swear as a web designer to refrain from personal taste! I am no longer an artist. I swear to refrain from creating a “work,” as I regard the concept as more important than the user experience. My supreme goal is to provide ambitious content. I swear to do so by all the means available and at the cost of any good taste and any aesthetic considerations.

Thus I make my VOW OF CHASTITY.

The World Wide Web, Wednesday April 11, 2018

On behalf of DOGME 95,000

Lars von Troll / Thomas Vinterblog