floor berkhout   cv   hello@materialprotocols.site / hello@fl0o.site           works     research && notes

an inquiry in intimate infrastructures
In an era defined by the aggressive abstraction of "The Cloud," our digital lives are increasingly held in centralized, invisible data centers, remote monoliths that alienate us from the machinery of our own existence! The server of domestic presence is a critical intervention into this alienation. It rejects the "Trojan Horse" model of commercial home assistants (e.g., Google Home, Amazon Alexa), which trade convenience for the total surveillance of the private sphere. This project is an act of infrastructural inversion: it drags the server out of the cold anonymity of the data center and re-centers it within the warm, chaotic reality of the living room. Navigating to the local IP address initially presents a static 'Dead End,' which only auto-refreshes to reveal the underlying archive (a self-hosted MediaWiki on permacomputing) the moment the user physically breaches the server's specific zones of proximity. It necessitates kinetic navigation, the user's body becomes the cursor. This forces a choreography of connection where moving through the intimate zones of the home, from the privacy of a bedroom to the openness of a kitchen, directly dictates one's position within the digital environment.

↘ Operating as an autonomous LAN node, through BLE beacons and RSSI triangulation, the server maps digital access strictly to physical topography. This transforms browsing into a choreographic act, where the body must physically navigate specific domestic zones to unlock the signal, re-entangling the physical self with the digital protocol.
[© floor berkhout]
server of domestic presence cover

the performance of telepresence
In its performative iteration (2024), the system expands its scope from local containment to global connectivity, exploring the "Uncanny Valley" of network presence. During a live online presentation, the server acted as a nexus for distributed bodies. By performing real-time packet analysis and IP Geolocation resolution, the server visualized the "ghosts" of remote participants. This created a telematic haunting: participants from across the globe were manifested not as video feeds, but as raw network entities occupying the domestic space. The project asks: What does it feel like to sense a stranger's latency in your hallway? It collapses the distance between the local host and the global guest, rendering the invisible architecture of the internet (IP addresses, pings, and handshakes) into a collective experience.

↘ Operating as an autonomous LAN node, through BLE beacons and RSSI triangulation, the server maps digital access strictly to physical topography. This transforms browsing into a choreographic act, where the body must physically navigate specific domestic zones to unlock the signal, re-entangling the physical self with the digital protocol.
[© floor berkhout]
server of domestic presence image 1
↘ Operating as an autonomous LAN node, through BLE beacons and RSSI triangulation, the server maps digital access strictly to physical topography. This transforms browsing into a choreographic act, where the body must physically navigate specific domestic zones to unlock the signal, re-entangling the physical self with the digital protocol.
[© floor berkhout]
server of domestic presence image 2

links
tardigrade experimental server site > https://tardigrade.site/

work methods
Mediawiki development, server infrastructure (PHP, HTML, Javascript), autonomous LAN, BLE beacons, RSSI triangulation, topographical access mapping, locative interaction...

↘ Collaborative presence on the server during the performance
[© floor berkhout]
server of domestic presence image 4
↘ Visual documentation of the digital and remote performance
[© floor berkhout]
server of domestic presence image 5
additional imagery of the domestic environment
[© floor berkhout]
server of domestic presence home