SI29/Our Digital Home

WIP notes

Introduction

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.

Place

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

Crowds

People around us that are not familiar with art and technology, who don't understand what we're doing in xpub

Key topics

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

Technologies

• A Raspberry Pi/an old laptop/a smartphone
• Web server: Nginx
• Tommi’s home’s WiFi
• Web upload + publish pages: HTML, CSS, Python (with Jinja and Flask)
• (meta)data(?)
• Paper, glitter and thingies

Social practices

• Round of introduction
• Eat snack and drinks together (menu: raspberry pie)
• Sharing anectodes of what digital home means, sharing personal files
• Structuring and styling HTML, css together
• Collective decision on what to publish online and what to keep locally
• Making our zine together

Schedule

• Possible dates 8^th, 14^th, 15^th March, and 27^th March 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)