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You are not lost.
You have arrived at a sub-page in the AIxDESIGN Archive.
This is a public repository – our way of working in the open and sharing as we go.
Have fun!
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INDEX
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2026 - ongoing
r00ts is a free, open-source tool that traces your web browsing to the data centers behind it, the real buildings with real addresses where your internet actually lives.
Some near(ish) you, others a world away. We show how we traced each one, so you can investigate too. Private by design. Built by AIxDESIGN.
Timeline: January 2026 – Ongoing
Team: Ploipailin Flynn (Project Lead), Andrea Albiac (UX/UI Design), Arran Lyon (Technology / ML Development), Nadia Piet (Creative Direction), Sustain SJ (Audio Recording), Elena Zaghis (Content Lead), Ana Marques (Design Support)
Link(s): r00ts.xyz
Funding: Stimuleringsfonds Creatieve Industrie - Grounding the Cloud
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The internet isn't in the cloud. It lives at an address.
Every video you stream, feed you scroll, website you visit comes from a place, a building, a data center. It has an address. It sits on someone's land, draws power from a specific grid, and pulls water from local reservoirs, with real people living right next to it. This isn't a secret. Researchers and journalists are documenting it medium-well. But that documentation sits conceptually far from how we use the internet every day. r00ts brings those investigations closer, rooting your everyday browsing to the data center that powers it.
We started with this question: can we find where each URL lives IRL? In short, sort of.
Stimuleringsfonds Creatieve Industrie generously backed us with a €30,000 grant, through Grounding the Cloud, to find out. We came in with a pile of ideas: things we wanted to learn, interactions we wanted to build. But a finite budget forces focus, so we kept the design and build small, sweet, do-able. We hope r00ts is just the start to this work, not a pixel-perfect end.
Along the way, we documented what we were trying to learn, what we tried, and what we decided, dead-ends and wish-list builds included. If you want the full trail, it's all on the research board.
When someone opens r00ts on a tab, the extension collects the IP addresses the page requests resources from, looks up which network owns each address range, and matches those ranges to known data centers and internet exchange facilities. The result appears in the extension popup, and in more detail on r00ts.xyz. That's the extension's only function.
It's live on the Chrome Web Store now, just click "Add to Chrome" and you're set.
Firefox is submitted and awaiting review. Until it's accepted, it's a manual install there: