Clouds to Commons: Closing Program

Clouds to Commons: Closing Program
Name	Clouds to Commons: Closing Program
Location	NDSM Theatre
Date	2026/07/23
Time	18:00—23:00
PeopleOrganisations	HDSC2026 participants, The Hmm, Kexin Hong, Amy Gowen, Martha Dimitratou, Livio Liechti, Hicham El Kaddioui, Martyna Pekala
Type	HDSC2026
Web	Yes
Print	No

“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 H&D Summer Camp, Clouds to Commons Closing Program, 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 program. Starting at 18.00, visitors can already join a printing performance and exhibition where the Summer Camp participants will be sharing their processes and outcomes of the last two weeks. This sharing moment will continue after the Hmm event. H&D and The Hmm put together the evening talk programme, where we will expore hands-on-hacking, collective learning, speculative fabulation, and big tech resistance with six artists, designers, researchers, and makers.

• 📍 Location: NDSM Theatre
• 🕗 Program starts: 18.00
• 🎟 Free before 20:00
• 🎟 Reserve your ticket for The Hmm @ H&D Summer Camp: 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

The Hmm @ H&D Summer Camp Speakers

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. https://www.echoesfromafar.com/

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. . https://humdrumpress.com/

Martha Dimitratou

In the last months we saw the mass removal of Instagram accounts belonging to queer and cultural communities across the Netherlands. Repro Uncensored, Bits of Freedom and Dutch queer organizations have issued a legal demand against Meta for the removal of their accounts. Martha is the founder and executive director of Repro Uncensored, an organization protecting access to information and defending freedom of expression across reproductive, digital and cultural spaces worldwide. Her work operates at the intersection of technology, culture, artificial intelligence and advocacy, bringing together creatives, SRHR organizations and digital rights defenders to challenge online censorship and expand access to critical reproductive health and political information. Repro Uncensored has documented a sharp rise in reports involving LGBTQIA+ communities, sex workers, reproductive health organizations, artists, nightlife collectives, and sexual health educators across Meta platforms in recent months. https://www.reprouncensored.org/

Livio Liechti

Livio Liechti is a writer and researcher focused on the materiality of information infrastructures. A political scientist by training, Livio‘s core expertise lies in researching and responding to the political economy and infrastructural dimension of digital technology and its intersection with civic space and activism. Together with Apsara Flury, a graphic designer, he runs Papertrail, a publishing collective that engages with hidden infrastructural systems and their effects on the public sphere. They use printed matter, such as zines, posters, and books to make infrastructural power visible and tangible. Their research combines a documentary perspective on the environmental effects of digital infrastructures, such as hyperscale data centres, with prefigurative experimentation with non-digital information infrastructures, such as street libraries. He is also active in the (anti) data centre movement, where he takes people on educational walks. https://papertrail.world/

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. https://hicham.party

Martyna Pekala

Martyna is a multimedia artist based in Rotterdam. Although Martyna practice spans an array of mediums and techniques, it finds its expression at the intersection of where virtual and physical realities meet. Echoing Donna Haraway’s cyborg theory, the boundary between nature and technology, human and non-human is not a rigid line. In her research, she fictionalizes and materializes the intricate effects of social media and online presence on an individual’s unique perception of the world. This is achieved through a sci-fi and fantasy toy merchandise-inspired cosmology of environments and self-performed characters that pertain to the notion of auto-gaze performed on social media. Martyna uses the lens of a camera as her mirror and the open tabs on her browser as a map to the mind. The worlds of her works manifest in vivid colors, bold patterns, and surreal compositions. However, beneath the comical and, at times, overly cute absurdity, an undercurrent of escapist discomfort attempts to seep through, prompting the viewer to question whether the pursuit of ‘staying connected’ may paradoxically lead them to isolation.