The Hmm @ Hackers & Designers

“One thing that I noticed is that I, as a human, share a lot of traits with bats”. Noam Youngrak Son explored if becoming a bat could help them to fight the helplessness confronting the COVID-19 pandemic. As a designer, Noam is excited about the unexpectedness that a well-designed fiction can open up, and the critical political discussions that it may cultivate. At The Hmm they will be talking about the traces of their fictional thinking to fight the fear, helplessness, and anger about the political stupidity that the COVID-19 outbreak unveiled. Link

The stories about the strait of Hormuz, in Iran, are often focused on military confrontations, drones, and oil conflicts—obscuring the natural beauty of these islands and the fact that they are a travel destination for many Iranians. Nazanin, a digital artist who explores the tensions between fiction and reality, created a video installation that emphasises the duality between the physical experience of the islands and the crisis-driven narrative portrayed in digital media. She’ll be joining us to talk about the stories that exist between the reality of an experience and its digital representation. Link

Described by Paper Magazine as “something between playing Chat Roulette and watching High Maintenance on speed”, Club Quarantine is an online virtual queer club that happens every night during the quarantine. For The Hmm we’ll be joined by Brad and Andrés, two of the founders of Club Q. They’ll be speaking about Club Q and the importance of connection, especially in the queer community, when safe spaces continue to dwindle. They’ll also dive into the beauty of what virtual club spaces bring, and what the future of these spaces might look like. Link

While making clay sculptures, Salim hangs out in obsolete online chatrooms where strangeness, blasphemy, and pulling each other’s leg are common practice.Salim was born and raised in Casablanca and is currently living in Amsterdam, where he is a resident at the Rijksakademie. He’ll be joining us for The Hmm to talk about low quality images and a sheep he saw floating in the sky. Link

Feeling a bit lonely during these social distancing times? Well your living room is about to become a dance party with Distance Disco! In this fun digital matchmaking dance party, you need to find your partner by using your best dance moves. Distance Disco is initiated and created by Mark Meeuwenoord, Arjan Scherpenisse and Klasien van de Zandschulp, in collaboration with TIN, as a quirky social experiment. For The Hmm we’ll be joined by Arjan, who will talk about the creation process of building a disco and game interface on the open source platform Jitsi. Link

With its growing face filter section and all kinds of digital augmentations, Instagram has been shaping what it means to be beautiful, especially for women. How does the requirement of instagrammability transform the environment around us? This is the question that Simona Koutná and Karina Zavidova (better known as the design duo ‘Rude Strategies’) want to address in their work—exploring the image of the modern-day feminine, digital beauty trends and, influencer culture. They’ll be joining us for The Hmm to talk about their latest publication about digital beauty and the ideals of glossy life.
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What’s your age through the eyes of your computer? And does it think you’re attractive or not? Over the past few months we’ve spent a lot of time behind our webcams, being unaware that Big Tech companies’ algorithms are continuously assessing us. Technology critic and privacy designer Tijmen Schep wants to show the consequences of this constant surveillance and created the website www.hoenormaalbenik.nl, with which you can test how normal you are.