Hackers & Designers Summer Camps

Annual Summer Camp that brings together artists, designers, software and hardware developers, writers, activists, creative technologists, media theorists, students and all their kin for 10-14 day immersive workshop program.

role: core organization and facilitation, technical infrastructure, documentation

In July of every year, the Hackers & Designers core group gets together to facilitate a summer camp, inviting 20-30 participants from the broad fields of art, design and technology of all skills, ages and abilities to join an intensive workshop program. Every year, we experiment with a different creative theme, organizational format and participant cohort.

The 2024 H&D Summer Camp, titled "Unruly Currents & Everyday Piracy", was organized for the second time at Het Wilde Weg in Sint-Oedenrode, and invited participants to reflect on and actively reject predominant principles of our contemporary socio-technical reality such as "ownership", "property", "newness" and "innovation", all whilst experimenting with working and living together on campsite for 10 days. Everyone that joined contributed an activity or workshop to the program and a special program was co-developed for younger audiences.

The 2023 H&D Summer Camp, titled "Hopepunk", responds to the widespread feelings of anxiety, uncertainty and dread caused by geo-political tensions, climate crisis and asymmetric distribution of wealth accelerated by planetary-scale computation. We proposed a critical yet optimistic approach toward desirable techno-social and eco-conscious futures that create connections across differences (age, gender, race, ability, skills, interests, species, materials). This was the first time the 2-week program took place as a camp in Sint-Oedenrode.

The 2022 H&D Summer Academy, titled "Connecting Otherwise", zooms-in on how the pandemic has forced creative practitioners in the cultural field to reinvent their work patterns and ways of sharing, collaborating and researching. This particular edition was the second iteration of our "hybrid-distributed" format, where four "nodes" of the academy each contribute 1 workshop to a shared program and all other nodes "execute" that workshop. This edition was hosted in Amsterdam, Berlin, Seoul, Aotearoa and online.

The 2021 H&D Summer Academy, titled "Hello World?", was dedicated to exploring open-source tools, infrastructures and collaborative principles that cater to collective decentralized organization in artistic and programmatic ways. This was our first "hybrid-distributed" edition, and was hosted in Amsterdam, Harare, Pittsburgh and Vienna.

The 2020 H&D Summer Academy, titled "Network Imaginaries", took place exclusively online due to the pandemic and hosted around 80 participants.