SI29/Our Digital Home

This is a workshop by Youjung, Tommi and Barbs following the practices and research done during Special Issue 29.

Work-in-progress notes

Introduction

Premise: this is to have an idea of what we want to do and for Doriane to revise. This is not meant to be the actual introduction to the workshop for the broader public. We will revise this text and make it more captivating and accessible.

When talking about privacy and social media, we are often led to question our digital identity. Nevertheless, all identities inhabit a home, like we do ourselves. What are our digital homes? How are they and who controls them?

This workshop will be a collective exploration of where our data, our work, and our memories live. Together, we will unmask the marketing depiction of the cloud as something remote and untangible, and we will concretely see that what we call “the Internet” is just a huge amount of more or less big computers all over the world.

Using a local device, we will replicate a little cloud, and play with it by uploading pictures and show that they can be accessed locally or via the Internet. Possibly, if time allows it, we will print the webpage we made and make a little zine about it.

Our digital home is a bit like our own home, we are opening the door to invite people in and to communicate with the world, while when it’s closed we want it to be our safe place. Same thing with ports in a connection.

Place

Tommi’s home. Playing with the concept of hosting a digital home in a home.

Crowds

People around us, or friends of friends who are not familiar with art and technology and who are puzzled by what we are doing in XPUB or in our life.

The context and environment we are aiming for is one of a social dinner or similar, so we will be limiting the participants to 8 people—10 in total, including us.

Key topics

• Concept of digital home (subjective, artistic)
• Materiality of the cloud

Technologies

• A Raspberry Pi/an old laptop/a smartphone
• Participants’ own devices (phones will be ok, they just need to connect to a webpage)
• Web server: Nginx
• Tommi’s home’s WiFi
• Web upload + publish pages: HTML, CSS, Python (with Jinja and Flask)
• (meta)data(?)
• Printer
• Paper, glitter and thingies

Social practices

• Round of introduction
• Snacks and drinks together (menu: raspberry pie 😜)
• Sharing anecdotes of what digital home means, sharing personal files
• Structuring and styling HTML, CSS together as much as we would love to do this, probably too complicated.
• Collective decision on what to publish online and what to keep locally
• Making a zine collectively

Schedule

• Possible dates: 14^th or 15^th March 2026 at around 15:00-18:00.
• Duration: 3 hours

1. Workshop introduction (10 minutes)
2. Round of introductions (1 minute per person)
3. Everyone draws what they see when thinking of their digital home (20 minutes)
4. Upload files to Web interface and display uploaded images live (10 minutes)
5. Show that files uploaded via the Internet were actually hosted on a local device (10 minutes)
6. Explain in essence how a server works (with a graph or something) (15 minutes)
7. Discuss what to publish on the Internet and what to keep private (only locally on device) (15 minutes)
8. Web to print page + zine making (20 minutes)
9. Feedback, final questions, and gossiping chitchat (20 minutes)

Communication and promotion

We will create a little invitation card, as if it was a special invitation to the home of someone. Youjung is very excited about this and she will be desiging it, probably turning it into a webpage too.

We intend to have very few people, therefore we will only reach out and invite participants directly, also because we want to pursue the vibe of an intimate gathering.

Exactly like a dinner organized with friends, we will be asking our participants which date suits them best between Saturday (14/3) and Sunday (15/3), then settle on the date when they will be most available.

Documentation

Youjung is an avid wiki writer and corporate designer, Tommi is a mad bard and fediobsessed, and Barbs is a crafty game maker and a cyborg.

We will find a combination of our practices to share the outcomes in a comprehensive, insightful and fun way.