What Was I Looking At Again .ᐣ.ᐣ.ᐣ Close your tabs: our dossier full of summer reads is now live ☀️
Nobody remembers what they saw online yesterday, yet everybody saw roughly nine hours of it. The feed is the most-consumed cultural object in human history and also the one nobody can quote back. It's television you can't turn off, a war and a skincare routine sharing a single scroll with no editor and no shame about the adjacency. We spent all year staring at it, trying to work out what all that looking amounts to. Our 2026 dossier is an attempt at an answer. Or at least at better questions.
Seven contributors go in with seven flashlights:
🔦 Livi Wilmore builds an interactive island where you rest from information overload while reading an essay about how badly you want to. Read more.
🔦 Livia Giannotti slows down by finding moments of awe when confronted with her Windows wallpaper. Read more.
🔦 Tara Kelton sends a piece of Italian brainrot into retirement, imagining what an AI-slop enforcer of work does once the work runs out. Read more.
🔦 Alina Lupu reads the Iran war as it actually reaches most of us, two people in the same city living in entirely different wars, one feed apart. Read more.
🔦 Marios Moros takes a deep dive into vagueposting and how it isn’t always about going viral. Read more.
🔦 And Symposihmm contributor Kevin Munger explains the 'new orality', and what we have to unlearn before we can even see it. Read more.
Back to the scroll,
ᯓ★ The Hmm ★ᯓ
☁ Clouds to Commons: this Thursday, closing night with Hackers & Designers
If the dossier leaves you wanting to build something other than the feed, join us this Thursday. We're closing out the H&D Summer Camp with an evening on self-hosting, shared infrastructure, and bringing the Cloud back down to earth. The term makes it sound like data floats weightlessly through the air, but it all runs on deep-sea cables, energy-hungry server farms, and mined metals, mostly owned and governed by big tech. So we're asking: can we make self-hosting more accessible, and imagine alternative internet structures?
Juliette Lizotte of Hackers & Designers helped shape the evening, where six artists, designers, researchers, and makers dig into hands-on hacking, collective learning, speculative fabulation, and big tech resistance. Expect Hicham El Kaddioui on self-hosting web services from a spare computer in their bedroom, Amy Gowen on publishing as a commons, Martyna Pekala on the auto-gaze, Martha Dimitratou on Meta's takedowns of queer and cultural accounts, Kexin Hong on the diasporic archive Echoes from Afar, and Livio Liechti on the data-centre boom eating Europe's landscapes. Come early: from 18:00 the Summer Camp participants share two weeks of work in a printing performance and exhibition.
Stuff you should know:
🗓 Date: Thursday 23 July 2026
📍 Location: NDSM Theatre, NDSM-Plein 85, Amsterdam, and the Inbetween livestream
⏰ Doors open: 19.45 CEST
🕗 Programme starts: 20.00 CEST
🎟 Tickets: on-site €8,- / on-site student discount €5,- / online livestream €5
Hmmterviewee of the month: Kexin Hong
This month's Hmmterviewee is Kexin Hong, a artist and filmmaker based in Amsterdam. Working across moving image, installation, and essay film, she digs into the political and psychosocial forces that shape our sense of reality, tracing the fragile relationship between collective trauma and memory. Her work asks how historical wounds reconstruct our and the very architecture of how memories form. She joins us at Clouds to Commons to talk about Echoes from Afar, an open-source living archive that rethinks how Asian diasporic stories in the Netherlands are told, held, and circulated. Read below to find out more about Kexin's thoughts on the internet
What content can you consume for hours on end?
A lot of things. Artist and scholar interviews, , trauma neurobiology, post-colonial theory, the unresolved histories and power dynamics in post-war Asia.
What's the most ridiculous rabbit hole you've fallen down on the internet?
Videos about gambling on raw jade stones in Myanmar haha. It is about people cutting open rough stones hoping to find jadeite inside.
Is there a memory of yours the internet has rewritten?
The internet has rewritten not just my memories, but my personal relationships too, lol.
What's something from an older internet you're still grieving?
When posts were text-only, no images, just words. People communicate honestly and slowly.
What's the strangest thing that's been lost in translation for you?
Sarcasm, somehow it always comes out sounding hopeful.
What's the last thing you screenshotted, and why?
A friend's Instagram story, because it was going to disappear in 24 hours ;)
Kexin will be part of our programme with Hackers & Designers this Thursday! And Saturday 12 September we’ll host a workshop by Kexin around her project Echoes from Afar as part of our experimental series. More information about this soon! You can follow her on Instagram: @nicole0hong. Discover more about Echoes from Afar below.
Image by Susann Mielke from Pixabay
Hmm-ing in the wild
Come find us at the following events!
◯ 1 August UVA Summerschool @ The Hmm Studio (more info TBA)
◯ until 2 August, Beyond the Manosphere – Masculinities Today @ Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam (hear what we think in the audio tour)
◯ 20 August, ai ai ai workshop at Kaliber voor Kunsten, Enschede
Stay tuned. After the summer we're running three experimental workshops and sessions at our Amsterdam studio: Kexin's workshop, a cyberdeck build, and a storytelling experiment with supermarket self-scanners. Spots will be limited for most of them, so keep an eye on our upcoming events newsletter.
Had a taste and want some more? The Hmm workshops are available to book here.
Activities in the digital field
◯ Exhibition: Data Never Dies Digital Traces & AI Afterlives @ IMPAKT (from 28 August to 15 November 2026)
◯ Exhibition: Wild Waters @ FramerFramed (Until 30 August)
◯ Open Call Antikythera: Agent World
◯ Call for web residencies by Akademie Schloss Solutude (Deadline: 7 August)
◯ Open call transmediale (Deadline: 28 August)
◯ Call for abstracts Politics of Machines conference (Deadline: 30 August)
◯ Open call for situated research residencies by Medialab Matadero (Deadline: 27 September)
◯ You can watch all the lectures from the INC exit fest via The Inbetween
We hope you enjoyed this editorial newsletter! Welcome back, and see you soon!
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