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Hello and welcome to The Transdisciplinary Vanguard!
This website was made as part of the Transdisciplinary Skills course of Governance of Sustainability at Leiden University. The assignment (I am somewhat certain) was to make a weekly blog rambling about the weekly readings. However, rather than just contributing to the seemingly infinite number of stale-looking substacks (that I really enjoy reading mind you, shout-out REDD-Monitor and Do Not Research), I wanted to do something more fun and creative. So, I decided to learn how to build a website.
The result is this "graphic-design is my passion" -looking fever dream of a website.
While part of the reason the website looks this way is that I have no clue what I am doing. There is a method (or at least a post-hoc rationalisation) to this madness. I have always liked how the early digital era looked (maybe because I grew up on these kinds of machines), and recently (as in the last 10 years or something) there has been a widespread wave of nostalgia for these kinds of aesthetics. Take for example the arcade scenes in Stranger Things, the digicam-hype,vaporwave, and the y2k fashion revival. But also, more importantly for this project, the Indie Web/Smallweb which is a movement trying to establish a network of personal websites on the margins of the internet, away from big social media platforms and search platforms. These websites, often drawing their designs from MySpace, (old-)Tumblr, AOL instant messenger (and a bunch of other early-digital sources), are usually filled with personal journaling, amateur poetry, and deranged/cryptic political polemics (I aim to contribute to the latter). For my purposes, the Indie Web represented an accessible way to start creating creative websites, offered a rich source of inspiration to draw from (click this link for a list of cool websites), and also established a clear target audience for me: Indie Web explorers.
Now, this may seem like a pretty small target audience (I mean I had not even heard of this stuff 3 weeks ago), but some of the websites in this network do real numbers. Besides that, I think an argument could be made that focussing on a very specific niche could be more effective than wildly flailing around in an attempt to gain broad salience. Furthermore, I think the ethos behind transdisciplinarity resonates well with that of the Indie Web, as there seems to be a shared commitment to encouraging broad popular engagement and empowerment through the direct involvement of a wide array of people (as opposed to some technocratic elite) in what are traditionally seen as expert/technical practices. For these reasons, I will be tailoring this blog to the strange proclivities of the Indie Web netizen by:
Trying to emulate early-digital aesthetics in my web-design, delving into and referencing increasingly niche and esoteric topics (as is common in those circles), maintaining a very personal and informal frame of reference, and using my flamboyantTM writing style (as my thesis-supervisor referred to it as). (I might also try to link it to Indie Web and Web.3.0 discourse depending on how forgiving the almighty word-count is.)
The purpose of this site is ultimately to make the netizens interested in transdisciplinary discourse by critically examining the readings of the course. Thereby showing them:
the revolutionary potential of transdisciplinarity
Anyways, I hope you enjoy reading the blog. I have also added all of my notes for the readings in the ALL NOTES section below, so feel free to peruse them if you do not want to do the readings. (Though you should of course!)
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TRANSDISCIPLINARY HALL OF FAME
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