“Cloud computing” has become the key component of today’s digital landscape. While the image evoked by the term “the Cloud” conjures an immaterial image of data floating through the air without a root or home, it overshadows the material reality of our digital habits. These habits run on deep-sea internet cables, energy guzzling server farms, precious metals mined for a large variety of chips, and more “stuff” that actually makes up what we now call “the Cloud”. To top it all off, the infrastructure that connects computing to everyday reality is largely owned, governed, and designed by big tech corporations that make all their decisions based on profit maximisation.
How can we bring sustainability, social equity, and democracy to the centre of how these everyday infrastructures are built, developed, and maintained? Can we make self-hosting more accessible? Can we imagine alternative internet structures? Can we bring the Cloud back down to earth? Join us for The Hmm @ H&D Summer Camp, Clouds to Commons, where we’ll take a deep, playful, and experimental look at the Cloud.
This evening is the final public event of the H&D Summer Camp, so we’ve put together a full programme. Starting at 18.00, visitors can already join a printing performance and exhibition where the Summer Campparticipants will be sharing their processes and outcomesof the last two weeks. This sharing moment will continue after the Hmm event. Artist and designer and member of Hackers & Designers Juliette Lizotte, has helped us put together the evening programme, where we willexpore hands-on-hacking, collective learning, speculative fabulation, and big tech resistance with six artists, designers, researchers, and makers.
🗓 Date: Thursday 23 July 2026
📍 Location: NDSM Theatre, NDSM-Plein 85, Amsterdam, and the Inbetween livestream
⏰ Doors open: 19.45 CEST
🕗 Program starts: 20.00 CEST 🎟 Tickets: on-site €8,- / on-site student discount €5,- / online livestream €5
♿️ Accessibility note The NDSM Theater is located on the ground floor. Unfortunately, there is no wheelchair-accessible toilet and the bar is located on the first floor. During the event we can provide live closed captioning for those with hearing impairments and disabilities. Please reach out to us via info@thehmm.nl, at least 3 days before the event if possible, if you are joining on-site and have this access need, so that we can reserve a seat for you within view of the screen with captions. If you are joining online via our livestream, live captioning will be available as one of the streaming modes.
💙 This event is kindly supported by the Creative Industries Fund NL and the Amsterdam Fund for the Arts
Speakers
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Hicham El Kaddioui
Hicham is a software developer by profession and tinkerer the rest of the time. They’re wary of privacy, online surveillance, and more generally of the power dynamics on the Internet. After being gifted a small mini-PC, Hicham began to explore what could be done with it, spurred on by a deep mistrust of Big Tech. Tonight they’ll be joining us to share some stories about their journey of self-hosting web services from a spare computer in their bedroom, and some insights from the Summer Camp workshops. Link
Amy Gowen
In what ways can we activate the knowledge contained in a publication far before and long after it takes material form? Amy is a writer, editor, and publisher based in Rotterdam, who co-founded and co-runs HumDrumPress, an expanded publishing practice that experiments towards publishing as a commons. She’ll be joining us to talk about HumDrumPress, sharing the specific tried and tested tools and methods for experimenting towards a commons-based publishing models in the permacrisis. In all of their outputs they work with a purpose-built, commons-based publishing model in an attempt to revise each stage of the traditional publishing cycle to make their processes as communal, open-access, and polyvocal as possible. Link
Kexin Hong
How is Asian diasporic life seen, or not seen, in Dutch society? Kexin is a multidisciplinary artist and filmmaker based in Amsterdam. Working across moving image, installation, and essay film, she delves into the psychosocial and political forces shaping our sense of reality. She’ll be joining us tonight to speak about Echoes from Afar, an open source online archive that rethinks how diasporic stories are told and navigated, with first person narratives and a real time translation system at the core of its design. This helps preserve the first person voice and resist the flattening that Asian communities in the Netherlands often experience in how they’re represented. Echoes from Afar lays the groundwork for forms of visibility that move beyond familiar images. Link
