[A book page, weathered and browned by time, with printed text on it. In the margins is a drawing of a small hand with a long finger pointing to one part of the text.]
This piece is part of our series with Naive Yearly, a conference on the odd, quiet, and poetic web. Read Kristoffer Tjalve’s foreword to the series here.
Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing points out that “Everyone carries a history of contamination;1 purity is not an option.”2
My interest in contamination emerged while thinking about books and acts of publishing.3 I’ve always felt drawn to books, as both objects and methods, but my studies and my work both center around writing code. While writing my bachelor’s thesis, I started thinking specifically about publishing online — and about how the materialities of a book and the act of “making public” take on different qualities once they enter digital realms.4
[A postcard with a drawing of a wide river with rocks and rapids beside a unadorned white castle. Mountains stand in the distance.]
I realized that most mainstream5 publishing on the web tends towards opaque, mediated platforms and seamless interaction; infinite yet restricting feeds.6
[A screenshot of a Google Earth bird’s eye view of the same river and castle.]
Today, online interfaces are too often governed by corporations who commodify individualism and limit agency to a minimum of swipe movements, all while extracting and surveilling user data.
But interfaces, like margins and thresholds, are zones of encounter.7
[An enlarged view of a glyph of a white gloved hand with the pointer finger pointing.]
They are the sites of creation (writing)8 but also perception (reading) and circulation (gathering).9
I read, write, and gather on interfaces: I browse “feeds,” open “folders,” close “windows,” and park “files” in my “drive.” My actions are dependent not only on a stable internet connection, but also the platforms and services that are designed to let convenience surpass criticality.
What if a platform's interface was regulated by those who inhabit and use it, rather than by corporate interests? Could we reimagine these interfaces as communal sites that emphasize unlearning and dialogue?10
[A laptop surrounded by four different wired mice, all hooked up to the laptop’s various ports.]
In an attempt to answer these questions, I found myself coming back to the concept of contamination. As a metaphor for publishing online, it aims for the disruption and complication of digital interfaces, challenging concepts of individuality and authorship.
Contamination is a troubling metaphor with which I am striving for infectious interfaces — inviting the parasite I want in order to open up to the transformations that arise from one another.
Contamination is also a material metaphor that enables me to understand the real world implications that digital technologies and visualities bring forth. It helps me to consider the environments I work and publish in and their distinct materialities.
When I trace contamination through digital and print interfaces I am crossing margins — the liminal spaces where interaction between two or more involved entities is situated.11
How can we understand the in-between not as gaping void — an unbridgeable gap — but an invitation for encounter? How can we inhabit the digital margins?12
While seeking intertextual encounters in margins, I didn’t just come across comments and annotations. Footnotes caught my attention, too, because they are at once graphical (textual) interface elements but also part of a (networked) infrastructure.13
Contamination enables us to reimagine ways of relating, and move towards encounters not assumptions.
Like André Breton's remarked, “One publishes to find comrades.”14
[An image showing on the left side a page of writing in a browser, and on the right, the source code. The code is in green and has ascii drawings and comments within it.]
[1] Contamination is, by definition, understood as the presence of a constituent, impurity, or “some other undesirable element that renders something unsuitable, unfit, or harmful.” The term derives from the latin tangere meaning “to touch.”
[2] We most commonly see the term applied to natural ecological entities or environments, such as when describing the pollution of land or water through pesticides. But in this text, I propose contamination as a method for publishing on the web — a landscape of increasingly algorithmic-driven platforms and sealed yet convenient interfaces. In its broadest sense, I see contamination as a provocation to move beyond the desire for purity. An expanded definition of contamination holds ideas of both individuality and multiplicity in tension, creating porous thresholds, bumps, leaks, and states of confusion and conviviality.
[3] The practice of publishing is deeply entwined with the production of knowledges. I want to consider the implications of the technologies that we use in publishing processes and how these technologies and protocols impact our social, political, and environmental landscapes. Publishing in print and publishing online hold different (though contiguous) material realities and underlying infrastructures. The ability to read on a website, for example, is dependent on an interplay of code (builds the website), server (hosts the website), internet connection (transports the website), web browser (interprets the website), and device (makes the website operable to the user). This chain reaction happens on request, by clicking a link or typing a URL. Compared to that, a book has a more permanent physical presence, but probably underwent a longer process of review and production, before it ended up on my desk.
[4] When I read a printed publication, a book or a magazine, it shares the space I am in and therefore inherently relates to and resonates with its environment. A book will be visibly contaminated by every encounter — depending on where I read or take a publication, it will show traces of rain, saltwater, or food; it will bend and its margins will be full of thoughts. Its condition is also dependent on where I acquired it and whether someone had already read this exact copy, perhaps leaving behind handwritten notes. I leave my traces on the publication and it leaves its traces on me — in the form of ideas, knowledge, and emotions.
When I read a downloaded copy on my desktop or a journal in my browser, those contaminations shift. I am not reading a physical unique document, but rather one that is either redistributed and downloaded, or a protocol — a place unknown — that I am requesting with my web browser. Seeing and interacting with a website's interface is only possible through a dynamic effort of multiple entities. Contamination, then, often happens on a more infrastructural level that is obscured for most users.Which makes me wonder: how could such an underlying disturbance seep through, into a graphical interface?
One way that might happen is through browser extensions. A browser extension can contaminate a website on the level of interpretation, often intervening in its intended visual presentation. I came to this idea after first hearing about Declarations, a research into the poetic materiality of CSS initiated by Doriane Timmermans. One of the many practical outcomes of this research are browser extensions, such as “weather” or “structure,” that willfully disrupt and juggle a website’s styling as much as a user’s expectations.
[5] Spatial metaphors were introduced early on to make sense of the web’s multiple layers and materialities. Many of them are centered around ideas of fluidity: We “surf” the internet, “leak" information, are concerned about “phishing,” and “stream” video content.
[6] I started thinking about these watery qualities of the internet when, in May 2024, Kristoffer invited me to speak at Naive Yearly. At that time, the event and my contribution to it felt quite abstract; I had little experience in preparing for such formats and didn't know where or how to begin. In our first meeting Kristoffer mentioned that the site of the conference would be The Museum of Architecture and Design (MAO) in Ljubljana, Slovenia. MAO resides inside of the Fužine Castle on the banks of the Ljubljanica River. As I started browsing its bankshores from afar, it was this river that gave form to my topic of contamination.
Following Lubiljanica's streams through satellite imagery and historical records, I noticed some links between what I had been thinking about bringing to the conference in Ljubljana, and what was already there. At the site where the river passes Fuzine Castle, a hydroelectric power plant caught my attention. Its dam levels the water’s curling rapids into smooth flows while creating a blockage. Pressure is built up and, when released, the water rushes down a tunnel into the power plant, where a generator and transformer produce electricity. Active since 1897, the power plant is still in use and operated by the Vevče Paper Mill.
The river’s regulated flows reminded me of the conditions I’d been encountering within the interfaces where I write and publish. These are digital interfaces, based on or connected to the world wide web. Has the web, as we continue to interpret it using fluid metaphors, become a body of water of its own?
If so, this body of water appears increasingly cloudy and opaque, and surfing has become nearly impossible. The leaks are hardly there anymore — instead everything is concealed by a seamless feed.
Reading, writing, and publishing on the web has not always been like this. Publishing was once a troubling act, an announcement. With today's neverending feeds, this act shifts. According to Paul Soulellis, “it's less a signal and more like noise, ongoing continuous transmission.”
In trying to compensate for tiring smooth flows, I keep imagining more mutual and transformative ways of interfacing and publishing. I understand publishing as creating, giving shape to and sharing information (in the broadest sense). But also as the act of creating publics. The control over what knowledges we have access to, how these are mediated and how we form communities increasingly lies in the hands of centralized platforms. From this paradigm shift arises an urgency to practice publishing online in solidarity, situatedness, and multiplicity, and to build interfaces that counter numbness with agency and exploration.
[7] Feeling the urge to take my eyes off pervasive feeds, I started flipping through images of medieval books. It occurred to me that the margins of these books were not just blank space, but rather a place for dialogue between readers and inscribers, documenting relations across time. The marginalia I found were not just written notes, but also illustrations or sketches drawn beside the text. There was one type of illustration in particular that caught my eye: a “manicule,” or a small illustrated hand with its index finger stretched out, pointing at a specific paragraph.
The resemblance of the manicule with the cursor pointer, which I watch emulate my gestures on a screen on a daily basis, was so unexpected that I only recognized it weeks later. I started to see the cursor as a manicule relocated. The cursor still inhabits a marginal — a liminal — space, but this time that space is the Graphical User Interface (GUI). For decades the command line (CLI), which follows a serial, linear, textual logic, was the main human-machine interface. With the release of the Apple Lisa in 1983, Computers with Graphical User Interfaces became available to the public. Gradually taking over daily usage, the GUI is structured by metaphors, layers, and objects — including the cursor pointer.
As a developer and designer, I am actively using both the command line and the GUI to interface with my computer, but I feel that both serve to distance and obscure the technology they mediate. Can we think of a more feral future, one in which a cursor is not only able to echo user gestures, but also explore on its own? For now, the limits of my screen mean the limits of a cursor’s world.
[8] In “Anyone with a Link Can Edit” Sara Kaaman, Jessica Gysel and Katja Mater reflect on their collective writing in digital interfaces: “We write through fiber-optic cables under oceans, waves encapsulating our outbursts of words and desires. We write through the 4G and 5G towers hovering over natural and urban landscapes.”
[9] Kaaman, Gysel, and Mater continue: “A publication is a reason to gather. Publishing creates publics, creates spaces. A spread is an opening into other possible worlds.”
[10] Last year, my friend Karen and I built a set-up that allows for multiple cursors on one computer. The cursors are operated by multiple mice (and therefore people) at once. At the Hackers and Designers Summer Camp, we conducted the experiment for the first time. We sat shoulder-to-shoulder in groups of three to five, browsing, drawing, and negotiating clicks. This form of shoulder surfing questioned what agency and privacy mean when we sit next to each other navigating within a shared interface. It created an interesting effect: instead of merely offering a site of human-machine interaction, the interface became a threshold, evoking conversation and discussion between participants in the physical space. Thinking back to this intimate experience, I asked myself where else we encounter such transformative spaces.
[11] Margins are elements of paratext, the thresholds of transition and transaction that mediate the relations between text and reader. They also offer a site where text encounters other texts or ideas encounter other ideas.
[12] words-on-margins.website is a conversation and research project I share with Polina, where we explore another kind of marginal space on the web: a website’s source code. Source code is the set of instructions that a programmer writes to create software or, in this case, a website. These instructions are written in programming languages such as HTML, CSS, and Java Script. Anyone can read the source code by right-clicking on a website and then clicking “inspect.” Looking behind polished front end design, Polina and I opened our web inspectors to read the source. What first appears as yet another sealed off layer of text is actually often permeated by annotations. Source code is commonly perceived as best practice when it lacks comments and is deemed self-explanatory (again, a desire for purity). However, commenting code can enhance its accessibility and readability for developers and curious readers.
In February 2024, Polina and I put together a workshop called “Writing on the margins of the web” to further explore this shared interest. While the comments in source code are mostly used for crediting or explaining snippets of code, we proposed understanding them as notes — elements of dialogue that provide space for process documentation, conversation, and things otherwise overlooked or deemed “unimportant.” During the workshop, participant groups of two commented on a (downloaded) website in the browser. Interestingly, many picked up on ASCII art as a more visual form of communication, but there were great written dialogues too.
[13] In March 2023, I participated in a Channel walkthrough, an event organized by Are.na and WAF GmbH for the launch of the Are.na Annual. Here I consulted with a footnote on the question of “Intertextual Intimacies,” the idea of citation and reading lists as reproductive technology. We called for more lateral modes of citation instead of the common vertical ones; citing your friends and peers instead of the most influential academics points a path towards inscribing community and canonizing movement from within.
While pondering “contamination” for Naive Yearly, I found myself thinking about footnotes again, this time for their ability to penetrate a body text and its perceived bounds, visually and content-wise. Footnotes pull apart the apparent unity of any text while demonstrating its porousness and impossibility of finitude.
In “Diagrammatic Writing” Johanna Drucker observed that there is a lot of pent-up energy pushing up and inward from the margins, the margins that are supposed to keep the body text on its page, away from the gutter, from falling into the surrounding worldspace. At the same time, as marginal notes, footnotes are always elements of dialogue. Some even say they are the original internet, with every footnote, every citation, every allusion being essentially a hyperlink to another text, to another mind. On printed pages, the majority of a footnote's labor is to enable circulation across time, but with the technology of the web, other possibilities were introduced. The hyperlink is one of them — maybe not as robust as a footnote, but what footnotes enable readers to do manually, hyperlinks do for you in real time. Taking a closer look at these paratextual elements reveals not only their different methods of functioning but also different ways of relating to the main text body. From their introduction on, hyperlinks were thought of as inline elements, residing within the text body not, like the footnote, beneath it.
Speaking of lowered positions, you might have recognized this text is itself a footnote inhabiting the marginal space beneath its main text. Margins are spaces of dialogue. By writing within them, I not only create a conversation between texts but also collapse perceived bounds and conventional hierarchies between content and annotations. Sub and main text here can be read as two distinct entities, but at the same time form one whole body — through the persistent contamination of one another.
[14] To extend Breton’s quote, one publishes to notice and engage with comrades — ecologies of beings always already entwined within the process. One publishes to touch, trouble, contaminate. One publishes not just to question, are you like us? but ask, what is it to be like you?
Works cited:
Merriam-Webster. (n.d.). Contaminate. In Merriam-Webster.com dictionary. Retrieved November 29, 2024, from https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/contaminate
Anna Tsing, “Contamination as Collaboration.” In The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins, 27–35. Princeton University Press, 2015.
Kim Kleinert, Compiling Edge Effects: Notes on Publishing Ecologies, 2023, https://ecologies.online
Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, "The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins," p. 28
Paul Soulellis, “Performing the Feed”, 2017, https://soulellis.com/writing/nov2017/
“QueerOS: A User’s Manual” Fiona Barnett, Zach Blas, Micha Cárdenas, Jacob Gaboury, Jessica Marie Johnson, and Margaret Rhee in “Debates in the Digital Humanities 2016” edited by Matthew K. Gold and Lauren F. Klein
“Anyone with a Link Can Edit” Sara Kaaman, Jessica Gysel, Katja Mater (Editors, Girls Like Us) in “Art Writing in Crisis”, Brad Haylock, Megan Patty (Eds.) Sternberg Press, 2021
“Shoulder Surfing: Communal Devices as sites of unlearning?” with Karen Czock, https://czkaa.github.io/workshop-shoulder-surfing/, with Hackers and Designers https://hackersanddesigners.nl/shoulder-surfing-communal-devices-as-sites-of-un-learning.html
“Autotheory as Feminist Practice in Art, Writing and Criticism” Lauren Fournier, MIT Press, 2021
“Diagrammatic Writing”, Johanna Drucker, Onomatopee 97, 2018
Kim Kleinert is a graphic designer and web developer interested in subversive publishing methods and their on and offline infrastructures. Her practice takes shape through writing code and text, preparing workshops and exploring visual forms. Kim is currently part of the „Experimental Publishing“ Master Program at Piet Zwart Institute (Rotterdam, NL).