SI29/Our Digital Home

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

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

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 during the workshop.

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

Schedule

Possible date: Saturday 14^th March 2026 from 14:00 to 17:00.
Duration: 3 hour

Workshop introduction (5 minutes)
Round of introductions (15 minutes) Short introduction of yourself and your idea of digital home
Share IP address (15 minutes) Whenever someone is online the Web interface displace an indication of their presence
Upload files to Web interface and display uploaded images live (20 minutes)
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 Read the metadata together
Explain in essence how a server works and difference between a cloud and local server (with a graph) (20 minutes)
Discuss what to publish on the Internet and what to keep private (only locally on device) (20 minutes)
Web to print page + zine making (30 minutes)
Feedback, final questions, and gossiping chitchat

Invitation graphic for the workshop

Communication and Promotion

We intend to have very few people(maximum 10 people), therefore 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.

After the workshop we plan to document the process on a wiki page and make it into a zine.