ITP Thesis Archive 2025

Project Description

Now You’re In My Pocket is a collection of portable web-art objects—small, hand-held devices each embedded with a unique offline browser-based artwork. These objects create their own WiFi networks; when you connect, a captive portal appears, but rather than a login screen, it displays the embedded artwork.

Each piece is powered by a Raspberry Pi Zero and a battery salvaged from a discarded vape. These artworks live entirely offline, only accessible by being physically near the object. You can’t screenshot or share a link; you can only share the object.

This project reimagines the the way we share net art: not through scalable, cloud-based distribution, but through embodied, ephemeral exchanges. It rethinks the metaphors we use for networks—away from scale and speed, toward slowness, friction, and relation.

Technical Details

Each object is 3D printed and contains a Raspberry Pi Zero powered by a rechargeable LiPo battery salvaged from a discarded vape. Each Raspberry Pi runs the open-source softwares HostAPD (to turn the Pi’s WiFi interface into a WiFi access point) and DNSMasq (for managing DNS and DHCP on the Pi’s network). The Pi also runs a Node.js server, which directs users to a captive WiFi portal upon connecting to the Pi’s network. Rather than a login portal, what is displayed in the captive WiFi popup is a browser-based artwork. Each object also contains an NFC tag containing the Pi’s WiFi credentials, allowing users to tap on the object with their phones to connect to its network and access the artwork it contains.

Research/Context

This project began with an interest in penetrating the layers of abstraction and depersonalization that characterize our daily interactions with the internet. Our experience of the internet as end users is so distanced from the global structures that create it, which becomes a problem when trying to address the harms caused or enabled by the internet. When we can’t see how our technologies work, we can’t imagine using them differently.

In the earliest iteration of this thesis, I intended to build an interactive educational toolkit about the internet on an infrastructural level, to help educators and organizers articulate and address its injustices and inequalities. While working on this, I became interested in the model of the black box system, when a system's inner workings are hidden, often intentionally. It’s something that is increasingly characteristic of our interactions with technology today, particularly with the recent, rapid advancement of AI technologies that operate along this model.

I was interested in trying to subvert the black box; I was influenced by the writer and philosopher Édouard Glissant’s concept of opacity, as a practice not to obscure, but to protect. Glissant wrote: “Opacity is not enclosure; it is the force that drives every community to relate to others while preserving the mystery of its own being.” On today's internet, which has become an instrumental tool for surveillance, a practice of opacity could perhaps be considered a form of care.

Trying to visualize this, I then built my own black boxes: physical servers you had to connect to locally, where everything was opaque by design. The first prototype held a web artwork that would share an excerpt from the book The Faggots and their Friends Between Revolutions by Larry Mitchell and Ned Asta when someone connected to it.

Further research into the history of the internet as an artistic medium helped refine these thoughts. I was interested in what possibilities could be opened up by taking the internet offline. Among the earliest practitioners and critics of what was then termed net art, there was a strong insistence on the importance of the network as part of the artwork, best described through artist duo MTAA's Simple Net Art Diagram, which highlights the connection between two computers with the tagline: The Art Happens Here.

This attention to infrastructural context in net art (maybe now more often referred to as internet art, web art, browser-based art) and in art that relies on computation and computer networking at large has substantially faded in the decades since then, even as the internet's infrastructural sprawl increasingly encroaches upon peoples' lives, with data centers straining towns' electrical grids and driving up ambient temperatures.

Net art pioneer Olia Lialina once stated, in an often-quoted interview: "If something is in the net, it should speak in net.language." This was in 1997. Today the internet seems to be such a monstrous corporatized tangle that it often feels that any art made with the internet as its medium is defeated by itself to at least some degree. What does it mean that every browser-based artwork you access on the internet more likely than not will pass through a data center owned by Amazon, Google, or Microsoft? How do we contend with this?

Returning to the black boxes, I felt that I wouldn't be satisfied with a stationary, gallery installation-style system; I wanted for there to be something more personal to these objects. My thinking was influenced by the work of early net artists like Entropy8Zuper, two people who met online and began making intimate websites for one another, as digital love letters. I knew I wanted to make web artworks, and I knew that I wanted a way of sharing them that was as meaningful as the works themselves.

So I adapted my system for a smaller, hand-held shape. I wanted something highly portable, simple to use, and inexpensive to make. Instead of hiding them in a box, I designed smaller, 3D printed housings for them, each a unique, sculptural object. It was to be a website you could hold, or hand to someone.

I used $15 Raspberry Pi Zeros, powered by small LiPo batteries taken from discarded vapes, which are perfectly rechargeable and not incredibly complicated to rewire along with a boost converter and an on/off switch. These were set up as WiFi access points and servers, which each held an individual web artwork the user would see by connecting to the Pi's WiFi network. In order to access the object's embedded artwork, you can tap a phone on the object's embedded NFC tag to connect to its network, or you can connect to it manually.

I also created a series of new web artworks to live inside these objects, all made with HTML/CSS and Javascript. Each of these is what I would call a browser-poem; poems that leverage the affordances the browser offers as part of their form. The text shifts and changes as the viewer interacts with the work, revealing more complex layers of meaning.

The purpose of these pieces take web-based art—something meant to live on the internet—and move it into a private, embodied space. It makes the shift from the public space of the cloud to the privacy of one’s own hands; from networks of mass distribution to networks of personal relation. Distribution happens not through servers but through sharing. What this creates is a different kind of network, built on gesture, embodiment, and presence.