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.

Connect to WiFi sudo raspi-config
See network information with ifconfig
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.

Find the router’s IP address
Visit that IP address via browser
In DHCP settings, add a rule to lock maintain the same local IP address for the Raspberry Pi
Set port forwarding rules, so that public ports are mapped to specific ports of the device
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.

Website Development

main.py and template.html

Doriane’s first feedback

Moved to the discussion page.

Reflection

Youjung

1. Introducing the concept and takeaway from the beginning

For the surprise we kept the explanation of the workshop abstract. But this it left the participants more confused. One of the feedback we received was that during the file uploading exercise, they didn't know where this was going. And the effect of unplugging the raspberry pi didn't have much dramatic effect than we expected. Without knowing the subject and going through 2 hours might be exhausting for them.

2. The target audience and delivery

We invited people who are close to us. Most of them are not familiar with what we are doing at XPUB. Towards the end of the workshop a lot of them were confused of what is the takeaway from this session. We should have introduced the idea and what we are doing first and explain it in a less technical way. By the end of the workshop we were explaining a lot of things through the terminal, Ping, Traceroute, IP address and alternative cloud services, and I think this might have overwhelmed the guests. If we could explain this through social practice like breaking it down into a play or hands-on activity would have been more effective.

3. Metaphor to Home

We used the metaphor "Our Digital Home". What if we used this metaphor or concept more strongly and coherently through the workshop. For example, when we were explaining how to connect to Barbara's computer through Tommi's home, we could have explained it as "Tommi visiting Barbara's home" and discuss on "Who is intruding our house and how are we giving permission to them". Then it might have been more easier for the participants to connect to the idea as it's related to our life.

Barbara

At the beginning of the workshop there was a bit of an awkward atmosphere. I also think people were afraid to speak up throughout the workshop.. I wonder how we could have facilitated a more open space for discussion. It was a lot of us talking at the group instead of with them.

Max and Ana gave me the feedback that it was difficult for them to figure out the common thread of the workshop. Especially in the second half we introduced a lot of different concepts and terms and it felt overwhelming. We could have shaved down all the different concepts more to one core skill we wanted to teach/explore. I think we were very enthusiastic and wanted to talk about a lot but in practice it made the workshop chaotic.

I agree with Youjung it would've been nice to make the workshop more engaging, interactive and use more metaphors and less technical terms. We started with the metaphor but didn't continue using it throughout the workshop.