SI29/Our Digital Home

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

🧠 Working documents

• Internal notes, brainstorming, reflections
• Workshop notes

ℹ️ 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 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

⏰ Schedule

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

The full schedule is now in the pad, and it will be used as reference, then transcribed here.

🏗️ Preparation

📣 Communication and Promotion

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

Raspberry Pi’s configuration

The original idea was to install Raspberry Pi OS (basically Debian Trixie optimized for Raspberry Pi) on Tommi’s Raspberry Pi 4B. Nevertheless, two different issues made Tommi give up and use their already configured Raspberry Pi 5.

1. Connect to WiFi sudo raspi-config
2. See network information with ifconfig
3. Create dedicated user: sudo useradd -m -s /bin/bash -G www-data ourdigitalhome && sudo passwd ourdigitalhome

Configure Nginx

We don’t install Nginx via APT, because we eant to use the latest Nginx version available and all its extra modules, so that we can take advantage of one of the super cool latest features that provides automatic certificate generation, therefore simplifying TLS encryption and allowing us to use HTTPS. Follow this guide.

Then we edit /etc/nginx/nginx.conf, inserting the following inside http {}:

resolver 8.8.8.8:53;
acme_issuer letsencrypt {
  uri         https://acme-v02.api.letsencrypt.org/directory;
  state_path  /var/cache/nginx/letsencrypt;
  accept_terms_of_service;
  ssl_trusted_certificate /etc/ssl/certs/ca-certificates.crt;
  ssl_verify on;
}

Router configuration

These steps follow this guide from Homebrew Server.

1. Find the router’s IP address
2. Visit that IP address via browser
3. In DHCP settings, add a rule to lock maintain the same local IP address for the Raspberry Pi
   
4. Set port forwarding rules, so that public ports are mapped to specific ports of the device
5. Set a dynamic DNS (DynDNS) service to keep a DNS server of a domain name up to date following the dynamic IP address of the local home network. Even if it relies on AWS, DuckDNS was the simplest and quickest solution.
   1. Create an account and choose a domain name on https://duckdns.org
   2. Go to the DynDNS page in the router and use the API token as the username, no password needed. The DNS should then be automatically pointed to the Raspberry Pi already.
      

FileZilla testing

We agreed that the most effective way to allow workshop participants to upload and move files around.

Doriane’s first feedback

Moved to the discussion page.