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.

Doriane's feedback: I LOVE your promise, (digital) identity and (digital) home are strong topic, you should really make them the focus. Since a lot of things has been said about the topic I would inevitably mention the quote

there is no cloud only someone's else computer

Or how we discussed communal (& feminist) servers with Kaa, and we mentioned how naming folder is a tool for living together! In that case I would suggest showing a few communal servers to the participants, to give them an example of people sharing digital home. (please read back this section: [Serving Gossips#Communal_servers] !)

I also love the little trick you plan to do of unplugging the home to say: omg we all depend on an electric outlet!

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 7-9 people. 10-12 in total, including us.

Key topics

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

Technologies

• A Raspberry Pi/a 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
• Collective decision on what to publish online and what to keep locally
• Making a zine collectively

Setup

The Raspberry Pi is placed in the middle of the table. A screen and a printer is connected to it. What this Raspberry Pi is will be unveiled only during step 5 of the workshop.

[Screen] --- [Raspberry Pi] --- [Printer]

Schedule

• 🗓️ Saturday 14^th March 2026 from 14:00 to 17:00.
• ⏰ 3 hour

1. Workshop introduction (5 minutes)
2. Round of introductions (15 minutes).
3. Each one of the participants draws on a sheet what they think when thinking of their “home” and another with their “digital home”
4. Share IP address or link (15 minutes). Whenever someone is online the Web interface displace an indication of their presence.
5. Upload files to Web interface and display uploaded images live (5 minutes) (See File uploads on a web page)
6. Go offline (20 minutes) Display on the screen (through the terminal or folder system) that files uploaded via the Internet were actually hosted on a local device
8. Explain in essence how a server works and difference between a cloud and local server (with a graph) (20 minutes)
9. Discuss what to publish on the Internet and what to keep private (only locally on device) (20 minutes)
10. Web to print page + zine making (30 minutes)
11. Feedback, final questions, and gossiping chitchat

Invitation graphic for the workshop

Communication and Promotion

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

Documentation

During the workshop we will document the discussions on an Etherpad. Also take pictures throughout the workshop upon consent of the participants. At the end of the workshop, we will make a collective zine together with the participants, patchworking the content uploaded to the local server.

After the workshop we plan to revise and restructure our notes and make a more curated wiki page, with a PDF zine.