Hackers & Designers (H&D) is an Amsterdam-based non-profit workshop initiative organizing activities at the intersection of technology, design, art and education operating since 2013. By creating collective situations of hands-on learning H&D stimulates collaboration across disciplines, technological literacy, and different levels of expertise. H&D develops hands-on workshop activities, as well as lecture programs, performances, game and hack events, meet-ups, publishing experiments, and since 2015 a 10-14 day intensive summer program: the H&D Summer Camp. In addition, H&D builds free, open-source tools, self-hosts community servers, and self-publishes experimental small-edition publications.

H&D’s activities are based on a flattened hierarchy, fostering a collective venture of shared responsibility. H&D’s program bring together (h)ac(k)tivists and creative practitioners—hackers, designers, makers, artists, developers, activists, inventors—of all ages, abilities, and backgrounds. Guided by intersectional trans*feminist principles, H&D encourages collaboration across differences (age, genders, racialization, disability, skills) and builds a community aimed at creating equitable and desirable techno futures. By sharing moments of learning and disseminating the knowledge produced in our activities we are expanding the possibilities of resisting big tech solutions and fostering a wider imaginary around open source culture.

With this application, H&D seeks support from AFK to organize an intensive workshop program titled Clouds to Commons, an 11-day summer camp taking place in Amsterdam in July 2026, including a public program. Clouds to Commons is an artistic research project that approaches digital infrastructure as a creative medium, using self-hosted publishing systems to critically explore questions of authorship, collectivity, autonomy, and care in contemporary digital culture.

The camp brings together artists, designers, community organizers, technologists, and hacktivists, with a stake in open-source / self-publishing and consider self-hosting of servers as significant artistic, political, and cultural practices. Participants come from Amsterdam, and other cities in the Netherlands as well as abroad, creating a vibrant hub in Amsterdam-Noord for the time of the camp. Participation does not require prior technical knowledge; workshops are structured to welcome different levels of experience, children are welcome to join.

The NDSM area has a long history as a site of technological innovation, collective labour, and knowledge-sharing through shipbuilding, traces of which remain present in the neighbourhood and its residents today. By hosting Clouds to Commons at NDSM Kunststad, H&D builds a bridge between this industrial past and contemporary artistic practices that critically engage with digital infrastructure. At the same time, the area is undergoing rapid transformation, with new residents and developments reshaping NDSM, making it an important moment to create shared cultural spaces where different histories, communities, and futures of the neighbourhood can meet. Clouds to Commons is important for Amsterdam as it situates questions of digital autonomy, authorship, and care within a local context shaped by histories of making and collective work. The project contributes to Amsterdam’s cultural landscape by activating a vibrant, diverse artist community while inviting local residents and broader publics to participate in accessible, hands-on explorations of technology as a shared cultural commons.

This year the theme Clouds to Commons prompts participants to treat their digital tools not as neutral technical objects, but as material for artistic experimentation and critical reflection. Collectively we will reimagine, fabulate and experiment artistically with self-hosting of servers and open-source publishing tools. Combining artistic exploration with technical skill sharing, we will collaboratively develop a regenerative publishing infrastructure consisting of self-hosted servers that reflect the artistic intentions of the participating group.

An accommodating public program, co-organized with The Hmm will contextualise and activate the process and results of the workshops. The program will cater to a wider audience through talks, performances and an exhibition that make the artistic and infrastructural experiments accessible and open to discussion.

The audience and participants should walk away with the experience and understanding of digital infrastructure as a cultural and artistic space—one that invites participation, reflection, and a rethinking of how knowledge and creativity are produced and shared.

H&D aims to deepen its narrative and world-building approach to organising hands-on practical and technical workshops, by treating the Summer Camp as a living commons: responsibilities rotate, stories accumulate, and each day folds into the next like an exquisite corpse. Daily publishing and occasional radio broadcasting during public programs make the process transparent and open for wider audiences, while a partnership with The Hmm allows a wider reach of the activities in Amsterdam and beyond. The program will also be open for caretakers/parents to join with their children, with the help of a pedagogical assistant the younger participants will bring their creativity and join the discussions.

1. Speculative Fabulation
Through guided experiments in world-building, character development, and visual storytelling, participants will explore alternatives to the cloud not only as technical systems, but as cultural imaginaries shaped by myths, promises and power relations. These experiments take the form of collective storytelling sessions, visual mappings, and performative exercises in which participants invent fictional communities and the digital infrastructures that sustain them.

For example, participants might imagine and prototype a local publishing server run by a neighbourhood, a migratory archive that moves with its users, or a server that operates according to ecological rhythms rather than constant uptime. By assigning values, rituals, constraints, and narratives to these infrastructures, participants are encouraged to ask different questions: Who maintains the system? Who is excluded? How does care, authorship, or failure appear in the design?

Building on previous H&D projects such as Sounds from Earth, Solarpunks, and The Age of Dust, these fictional frameworks are then translated into concrete design decisions for the evolving publishing infrastructure during the hands-on workshops. Inspired by thinkers such as Donna Haraway or Saidiya Hartman, Speculative Fabulation becomes a critical tool that allows participants to step back from dominant technological paradigms and prototype alternative socio-technical futures in a tangible and situated way. Collective world-building creates a shared space of imagination that supports critical reflection, collaboration, and experimentation, resulting in infrastructures that are not only functional but also culturally and artistically grounded.

2. Hands-on hacking
Hands-on hacking forms the material core of the Summer Camp and treats technical intervention as an artistic and critical practice. Participants will work directly with low-bandwidth setups, reused and repurposed hardware, and free/libre open-source software to build and modify self-hosted publishing infrastructures. These sessions include collectively configuring servers on minimal machines, stress-testing publishing tools under constrained network conditions, and experimenting with alternative interfaces that prioritise slowness, locality, and accessibility.

By intentionally working within technical limitations, participants confront the material realities of digital systems and the global inequalities embedded in mainstream, resource-intensive technologies. Hacking in this context is not about optimisation or efficiency alone, but about revealing hidden dependencies, questioning norms of constant availability, and resisting the logics of disposability and extraction. Through these hands-on experiments, technological constraints become artistic parameters that shape both the aesthetics and ethics of the infrastructures produced.

3. Collective learning and empowerment
The Summer Camp fosters a hands-on, collaborative environment where risk-taking, curiosity, and experimentation are encouraged. Rather than a bootcamp with pre-determined outcomes, it is conceived as an immersive communal experience in which participants co-create the learning process itself. This open environment allows individuals to try new tools, methods, and approaches that they might not feel confident experimenting with alone, turning uncertainty and failure into generative, artistic opportunities. Through shared workshops, peer-to-peer tutorials, and lectures, they gain insight into the hidden material, social, and environmental dimensions of digital infrastructures.

By intentionally blurring the roles of participants, tutors, and mentors, the program cultivates a dynamic ecosystem in which everyone contributes expertise, imagination, and feedback. Each to their own ability, children can also be teachers. Activities such as co-designed sharing sessions, daily documentation, and collaborative public events create iterative cycles of experimentation and reflection. In this way, participants not only transform the tools and infrastructures they engage with, but also develop new ways of working together—practices grounded in care, shared responsibility, and accessibility—that continue to inform their creative and professional lives beyond the Summer Camp.

4. Instant Publishing
Reflection and knowledge-sharing are embedded into the daily rhythm of the Summer Camp through communal publishing activities. Each day, participants contribute to a shared digital platforms through writing, documenting, and producing multimedia outputs, that make the creative and technical processes visible both to the group and to a wider public. These activities include visual maps of infrastructures, collaborative zines, live updates on social media, and radio broadcasts, offering multiple formats for storytelling, reflection, and experimentation.

In addition to daily outputs, participants contribute to ongoing H&D publishing projects during and after the camp, creating a continuum of engagement that extends the life of their experiments beyond the immediate workshops. This practice of “instant publishing” ensures that knowledge, creative insights, and technical discoveries are shared openly and collectively, turning reflection into tangible artefacts that others can engage with, remix, and build upon.

Through these publishing practices, H&D envisions a future in which self-organised, communal infrastructures foster equitable access to knowledge and empower participants to imagine and practice alternative technological worlds. Publishing becomes both a tool for critical reflection and a medium through which the creative, social, and political dimensions of digital infrastructure are made legible and actionable.

From evaluation forms and participant feedback from previous editions of the H&D Summer Camp, we have learned that especially the hands-on approach to our programs, as well as the emphasis on collective learning and community building, and the attention we pay to selecting diverse participant groups such as queer and disabled community, resonates strongly within our network and beyond.

H&D’s thematic threads are often inspired by artistic practices of its organizing group and the wider community in our orbit. We tap into genres such as eco and transfeminism, science-fiction, solarpunk and hopepunk, which induce urgency to our programs, timeliness, – offering critical yet hopeful outlooks for working towards holistic and intersectional ways of practising sustainability and regeneration (technically, socially, ecologically, economically, culturally).

The limitation of hands-in workshop format typically accommodates only a limited number of 20-30 participants at a time. We achieve wider audience reach by combining longer, intensive workshops with a public talk, exhibition, or performance.


The current organization of the summer camp responds to participant feedback from previous years, and has been praised as being a uniquely caring, inspiring, energizing, as well as a safe collective experience rooted in mutual respect and solidarity. The last Summer Camp H&D organised in 2024 premiered a kids-friendly workshop track to make the experience accessible to multiple generations, developed with MU Hybrid Art House. Their education department helped us translate complex topics to the younger (6-12 years old) campers and visitors of the public program on the weekend and brought a festive intergenerational quality to the open days that were well attended.

Intergenerational learning allows different skill sets to exist side by side. A child’s perspective, fascinations, and intuitive playfulness are acknowledged as meaningful forms of knowledge. This aligns with H&D’s non hierarchical approach to learning, where children and adults learn with each other rather than above or below. When adults learn alongside them, children feel they can influence what happens, not just follow instructions.

Impact of previous H&D Summer Camps (since 2015)
Since 2015, the H&D Summer Camp has functioned as a recurring platform for artistic experimentation, skill-sharing, and community formation at the intersection of technology, art, and critical practice. Each edition has brought together international and local groups of artists, designers, technologists, and activists, many of whom continue to collaborate beyond the duration of the camp. Outcomes of previous editions include open-source tools, publications, long-term working groups, and spin-off projects that have been presented at cultural institutions, festivals, and self-organised spaces in Amsterdam and internationally.

Examples are: Former participants have established important critical technological platforms such AIxDesign initiated by Nadia Piet. H&D has contributed to the environmentally conscious low-res streaming practice of The Hmm. Bringing makers from across the world to Amsterdam such as the Seoul-based artist group dianaband inspired participants such as Benjamin Earl to continue their practice and proposed technologies such as the small file Wifi Publishing workshop to other places and communities.

Equally important has been the development of a sustained learning community: participants often return in different roles, as mentors, collaborators, or organiser, contributing to the continuity of knowledge and collective memory within H&D. The camp’s emphasis on accessible, hands-on learning has enabled participants from non-technical backgrounds to engage critically with digital tools, lowering barriers to participation and fostering confidence in working with technology as an artistic and cultural medium.

Long-term impact for Amsterdam
In the long term, Clouds to Commons strengthens Amsterdam’s cultural ecosystem by supporting artist-led, commons-based approaches to digital infrastructure at a moment when technological systems increasingly shape public life. The Summer Camp builds on H&D’s ongoing work in the city, such as the self-organisation meet-up co-organised with Platform BK at de Appel, which brought together artists, cultural workers, and technologists to exchange knowledge on self-hosted servers and collectively managed technological infrastructures. By combining hands-on artistic research, public programming, and open publishing, the project embeds practical knowledge and critical perspectives within Amsterdam’s artistic communities, contributing to a culture of technological literacy, shared responsibility, and care. Through sustained networks, recurring activities, and openly accessible outcomes, Clouds to Commons reinforces Amsterdam’s position as a city that values experimentation, openness, and socially engaged artistic research around technology.

Creating community through publishing


H&D’s relationship to publishing stems from the intention to widen the reach of our activities, document and disseminate what is being produced in short-lived workshop-based programs. H&D documents and disseminates the lessons and propositions that emerge from our workshops through various on and offline publishing formats. Beyond that, the digital infrastructures and open source tools we build are themselves artistic experiments and create tangible alternatives to “the cloud.” By collectively building, maintaining, and sharing our own servers, we challenge the abstraction of cloud technologies and make the material/ecological, political and social dimensions of computation visible.

We want to foreground this part of H&D’s practice during HDSC2026, where we will reimagine cloud practices not as abstract and inevitably extractive, but as situated, grounded, and regenerative. Together, we explore what it means to build resilient tool ecologies within our communoutside the monopolies of Google, Microsoft, and Apple.

This approach is in line with previous projects such as our recent collaboration with Learning Palestine that confirm the necessity and power of open source collaborative publishing tools in becoming vehicles of solidarity, political and technical literacy. Learning Palestine is a volunteer-run initiative of artists and activists who translate and republish texts, and circulate pamphlets across community spaces and bookshops worldwide through decentralized networks of trust. Despite the strength of these networks, initiatives like Learning Palestine face bottlenecks at the design and editing stage, where dependence on commercial cloud services such as Adobe Creative Suite but also editing tools as Google Docs clashes with their values. Furthermore some of the tools they use are complicit with the military complex, ecocide and war crimes.

H&D collaborated with Learning Palestine to experiment with self-hosted and open-source alternatives that allow for writing, editing and designing publication collaboratively. One idea emerging from this ongoing collaboration is the possibility for Learning Palestine to host a self-contained, portable instance of the tool on a local server, allowing them to travel with their publishing infrastructure and avoid reliance on extractive global platforms in the future.
 This example illustrates the broader ambition of Clouds to Commons: to develop regenerative publishing infrastructures in dialogue with specific artist and activist communities, letting their needs shape how tools evolve, how servers are configured and maintained, and how infrastructures remain situated, collective, and sustainable over a long time.

H&D endorses the Diversity & Inclusion Code and actively integrates social engagement and artistic integrity into both its organisational structure and its programming. Our organising group is diverse in terms of age, gender identities, racial and cultural backgrounds, abilities, and technological affinities, and this diversity directly shapes the themes, formats, and facilitation of our activities. We work from principles of intergenerational exchange, queer-friendliness, trans*feminism, racial justice, and disability justice, and understand inclusion as an ongoing practice rather than a fixed goal.

Accessibility is embedded in the design of the Summer Camp and its public program. Participation does not require prior technical knowledge; workshops are structured to welcome different levels of experience, and communication is intentionally clear and jargon-aware. We apply a sliding-scale participation fee to lower financial barriers and actively encourage applications from individuals and communities that are underrepresented in technological and artistic fields.

The Summer Camp is designed to allow for different levels of intensity of participation. This makes it possible for participants with care responsibilities, chronic illness, or fluctuating energy levels to take part in ways that are sustainable for them. Ahead of the workshop program and public events, participants are invited to share access needs and constraints, which are taken into account in the scheduling, pacing, and facilitation of activities. Closed captioning, interpreter and other accessibility measures can be put in place accordingly. A dedicated team member is responsible for coordinating access needs and supporting participants throughout the program, ensuring that care and flexibility are actively upheld rather than treated as exceptions. Participants with children are welcome to join, childcare will be shared among participants as well as with support of a pedagogical assistant a few hours per day.

Participants are selected through an open call that is widely disseminated via our networks, partner organisations, and community channels in and beyond Amsterdam. Selection is based on motivation, curiosity, and the potential to contribute to and benefit from a collective learning environment, rather than on formal credentials or technical expertise. We aim to assemble a group with diverse perspectives, practices, and lived experiences, ensuring a balance across disciplines, backgrounds, and levels of experience.

H&D collaborates with a broad range of partners across Amsterdam and beyond, enabling us to reach audiences outside established cultural and technological circles. Through these practices, we strive to create inclusive, welcoming environments in which participants and audiences feel empowered to experiment, learn, and contribute, while remaining committed to reflection and continuous improvement in our approach to diversity and inclusion within digital culture.

H&D reaches diverse audience groups through targeted outreach via community networks, artist-run spaces, adult education initiatives, and grassroots organisations in Amsterdam, including collectives working with people new to artistic practice, individuals without formal technical training, and practitioners operating outside institutional contexts. We actively use peer-to-peer invitations and collaborations with initiatives focused on migrant communities, queer and trans communities, people with care responsibilities, and self-organised learning environments, ensuring the program reaches beyond dominant art and technology circuits. Free and low-threshold public events function as accessible entry points, enabling residents, cultural workers, and artists at different stages of their practice to engage with the program without prior technical knowledge or familiarity with H&D.

At Hackers & Designers, sustainability is central to both our organisational practices and creative work. In our digital and technical practices, we consistently use open-source software, reinforcing our commitment to transparency, accessibility, and community-driven development. We are mindful of the materials, components, and tools we use, prioritizing re-use, adaptation, and iteration over immediate consumption of new resources. This approach includes designing with existing materials, giving items a second life, and building on previous projects rather than following the latest technological trends.

Food and catering are treated with the same care, with an emphasis on thoughtful and responsible choices. For example working with zero waste food collection.

As a collective, we are guided by a mission to practice what we preach: advocating for equitable and sustainable techno-futures, promoting approaches based on the commons, and challenging monopolistic practices in Big Tech that contribute to social and climate injustices. Sustainability at H&D is approached holistically and intersectionally, encompassing ecological, social, economic, technical, and cultural dimensions. Through experimentation we explore regenerative practices that are socially, technically, and environmentally responsible, continually learning and iterating on how to operate more sustainably as a community.

The H&D network spans from European countries such as Austria, Belgium, Germany, France, Denmark, Romania, to countries across the globe such as Aotearoa (New Zealand), Armenia, Canada, China, South Korea, the USA, and Zimbabwe. Sister initiatives around the world contribute to H&D’s activities, including the annual H&D Summer Camp and international residencies.

H&D works with local and international established institutions like MU, SoundLab/Muziekgebouw aan t IJ, Constant Association for Art and Media, WAAG, Nieuwe Instituut, Institute of Network Cultures, GfZK Leipzig, Tetem, Dublin Science Gallery as well as emerging initiatives such as Prototype Pittsburgh, Mz* Baltazar’s Laboratory, Bergen Art Book Fair, Varia and The Hmm. These organizations help us to position our program and reach our target group directly.

H&D has developed from a spontaneously organized peer group who work voluntarily towards a mature 9-member decentralized organization, handling fair enumeration, undergoing regular evaluations and having developed a diverse financing mix. In recent years H&D has worked on transparency of our finances and governance structure. We hired a new accounting firm and intensified our collaboration to streamline our finances, which is now being handled by two more experienced coop members who have undergone additional financial training.

We continue to make efforts to develop further as a durable and healthy organization without giving up the unique character of H&D as a decentralized organization driven by the urgencies of its members and the wider community.

Although Hackers & Designers is legally constituted as a stichting, the organisation functions in practice according to cooperative principles. The ‘H&D COOP’ currently consists of nine members who form’ a decentralized organization that aims to distribute power over decision making. H&D operates locally in the Netherlands as well as internationally. Since 2019 H&D operates from a shared studio at the NDSM Loods in Amsterdam, which serves as our ‘headquarters,’ where we meet, develop workshops, and host guests and public programs.

The H&D COOP members at the time of submitting this application are:

• Selby Gildemacher (NL) is an artist based in Amsterdam. Next to that he is a co-founder and host of Radio Noord Amsterdam, tutor at Breitner Academie, Amsterdam University of the Arts, advisor visual arts and design in public space for Zwolle, external advisor visual arts and design in public space for Kunst & Cultuur, Arti et Amicitae Program Committee. Selby co-founded Hackers and Designers, together with Anja Groten and James Bryan Graves in 2013.
  • Main responsibilities in the co-op: project development and production
• Anja Groten (DE) is an Amsterdam-based designer, educator and community organizer. Anja runs the Design Master course at the Sandberg Instituut Amsterdam, Master of the Rietveld Academie. In June 2013 Anja co-founded the initiative Hackers & Designers together with James Bryan Graves and Selby Gildemacher.
  • Main responsibilities: Project development, research, acquisition, developing pedagogical formats, publishing.
• Heerko van der Kooij (NL) is a creative technologist and educator. After collaborating and hosting several workshops for H&D since 2014, Heerko joined the coop in 2017. He’s a lecturer at the Utrecht University of the Arts.
  • Main responsibilities: Workshop development and hosting, soft and hardware research and development.
• Juliette Lizotte (FR) is a video maker, designer and DJ based in Amsterdam. Her current research focuses on mythological figures and ecofeminism. Juliette joined the coop in 2017 after collaborating with H&D as a workshop participant.
  • Main responsibilities: Artistic direction, project development, Communication, documentation, production
• Pernilla Manjula Philip’s (SE) work offers an alternative perspective on medical care-products and encourages questions around agency of the ill-body in relation to the medical industry. Pernilla joined the coop in 2022.
  • Main responsibilities: Artistic direction, project development, workshop facilitation, hosting and moderation.
• Karl Moubarak is a designer and tool-builder whose practice is rooted in the digital sphere and focuses on the research, development and social activation of experimental interfaces, infrastructures and on and offline sites for exchange. He joined the coop in 2020 after collaborating with H&D as an intern during his bachelor studies.
  • Main responsibilities in the coop: Project development, budget coordination, research, website maintenance, production, documentation.
• slvi.e / Sylvie van Wijk (NL) is a writer and editor. Their work explores autonomous practices and alternative economies. They joined the coop in early 2023.
  • Main responsibilities: publishing, research,documentation, administrative and financial workflows.
• vo ezn (GE) is a sound && infrastructure artist, working on server-side tensions and introverted interfaces. Her autonomous practice also concerns knowledge and tool-sharing endeavors rooted in an open source attitude. She is part of intersectional feminist server collectives/networks : Systerserver, Anarchaserver and Minadoraserver.
  • Main responsibilities: infrastructure care, documentation
• Ren Loren Britton (USA/DE) is a transdisciplinary artist and designer who works on transfeminism, technology and disability justice, Ren Loren Britton explores how we can reimagine bodies, technologies and societal systems by asking critical questions about accessibility and inequality. They joined the coop in 2025.
  • Main responsibilities: Artistic direction, project development, workshop facilitation