The Cloud: sounds fluffy and immaterial. The truth is rather different. Join us on next Thursday 23 July for The Hmm @ Hackers & Designers Summer Camp, 20.00 – 21.30 CEST at NDSM Theatre, Amsterdam and on our livestream.
For two weeks this July, the 2026 H&D Summer Camp Cloud to Commons is asking what it takes to actually leave big tech: hosting your own services, maintaining your own infrastructure, and doing it together instead of alone.
For the closing night, we've teamed up with artist, designer, and H&D member Juliette Lizotte to bring together the programme. Expect stories of running web services from a spare bedroom computer, the GenAI data centre boom quietly spreading across Europe, publishing as a commons, and more ways of prying the everyday internet out of the profit-only logic it's currently stuck in.
Get to know the speakers 🗣️
Image courtesy of Amy Gowen.
Our speakers approach the Cloud from very different altitudes, from their own bedrooms to hyperscale data centres.
In recent months, we've seen the mass removal of Instagram accounts belonging to queer and cultural communities across the Netherlands. We're very happy to welcome Martha Dimitratou as one of our speakers. Martha is the founder and executive director of Repro Uncensored, one of the organisations that issued a legal demand against Meta over these removals.
Hicham El Kaddioui is a software developer by day and tinkerer the rest of the time, who turned a gifted mini-PC and a deep mistrust of big tech into a self-hosting journey he'll share stories from, straight from the spare computer in his bedroom. Kexin Hong is a artist and filmmaker who will present Echoes from Afar, an open-source online archive that rethinks how Asian diasporic stories in the Netherlands are told, translated, and navigated.
Amy Gowen is a writer, editor, and co-founder of HumDrumPress, and will share tried and tested tools for publishing as a commons in the permacrisis. Martyna Pekala's camp, surreal video work traces what personalised algorithms do to , a phenomenon she calls the auto-gaze. And Livio Liechti, researcher, writer, and (anti) data centre walker, will map the GenAI-fueled boom of hyperscale data centres spreading across Europe, and how to make their impacts visible and contestable.
In the meantime, we encourage you to check out the entire programme of the Summer Camp for some inspiration; it is full of examples of hands-on alternatives, from a dinner of tempeh fermented with server warmth to a field trip reclaiming NDSM from real estate speak, all pointing to a future where our digital are collective, convivial, and even a little more edible – truly hopecore for our times.
Stuff you should know
📅 Date: Thursday 23 July 2026
🕗 Times: 20.00 – 21.30 CEST, exhibition from 18.00
📍 Location: NDSM Theatre, NDSM-plein 85, 1033 WC Amsterdam, or online via our livestream
🎟 Tickets: €8,- regular, €5,- students, €5,- livestream
🗣️ This event is conducted in English.
💙 This event is kindly supported by the Creative Industries Fund NL and the Amsterdam Fund for the Arts
Thanks for reading. Hope to see you soon!
