Hackers & Designers: a summer camp challenging power through collective making and being
For ten days in July, Hackers & Designers held the 2024 edition of their summer camp with a program full of workshops, interventions, communal activities, radio sessions, and collective experiments centered on the topic of “Unruly Currents & Everyday Piracy”.
Nestled between sprawling farm fields and winding narrow country roads, Het Wilde Weg in The Netherlands’ Het Groene Woud nature area was teeming with unruly currents and everyday piracy headed by a crew of hackers, designers, artists, and makers from the 15th to the 25th of July. These 30 residents of the Hackers & Designers Summer Camp 2024 joined together a programme of workshops, nightly pirate radio livestream broadcasts, intergenerational explorations and play, and post-digital hacking.
Looking at piracy as a generative process, one that fosters and facilitates cultures of co-authorship, co-ownership, mutual respect, and accountability, the residents of the 2024 edition of the Hackers & Designers camp were not only invited to actively shape the camp’s program but also worked together to open-source codes of conduct, reimagine ways of working together and collaborating, and dream together new narratives for how collective living, making, and being could exist.
For the 2024 edition of the summer camp, Hackers & Designers also teamed up with collaborator MU Hybrid Art House to run a parallel program track for children and young adults between the ages of 6 and 12, inviting intergenerational interventions into the summer camp’s interworkings and activities.
While the days were filled with a plethora of activities and workshops, the evenings each followed a rhythmic routine of group meal time and live recording sessions of the Hackers & Designers Pirat(e)s Radio Broadcast, which was streamed in real-time at 20:30 CET. The Pirat(e)s Radio Broadcast collectively organized by the camp’s participants cemented itself as the epitome of communal learning, making, and living together, as everyone would gather around eagerly awaiting to share contributions from the day’s events, workshop outcomes, weather reports, astrological assessments, recorded dreams, short stories, music, jingles, and more.
Electrical power, social power
Joining halfway through the camp’s program, I found myself seeking shelter in Het Wilde Weg’s venue amongst the welcoming but already bustling and ongoing sessions of the camp’s day-to-day activities program while the rain poured down on the sprawling agricultural landscape surrounding us.
Joining in for my first foray into unruly undercurrents and everyday piracy, I attended Li-bat quest where workshop facilitators, who wish to be known collectively as Rufus, challenged us to reexamine our relationship with systems of power, both social and electrical. Equipped with energy meters, we set out to investigate how much power our favourite devices were consuming from the electrical grid and collectively imagine alternative formats for power storage, transport, and usage. Some surprisingly hungry electrical consumers were uncovered to be our routinely used hair dryer and electrical kettle while items such as the camp’s electrical keyboard offered lower electrical consumption over time.
“Workshop facilitators challenged us to reexamine our relationship with systems of power, both social and electrical.”
Our technological dependence on energy also causes us to be dependent on institutional and national infrastructures that facilitate the movement, distribution, and consumption of energy, making getting access to energy for some impossible while others live with it in abundance. Rufus encouraged us to imagine ways we could collaboratively and collectively rethink energy distribution that challenged predominant currents of energy transfer and consumption.
Access as an ongoing frictional practice
While thinking of access in relation to the unruly undercurrents and everyday privacy of Li-bat quest, I was reminded of the main tenant of Aimi Hamraie and Kelly Fritsch’s “Crip Technoscience Manifesto” as an approach to “conjure frictional practices of access production”.
In their manifesto, disability scholars and activists Hamraie and Fritsch assert that frictional practices of access production must first and foremost acknowledge that “science and technology can be used to both produce and dismantle injustice”. Generated by the frictions that are inherent in access production, these forms of world-remaking, justice—especially in the context of disability justice—and accessibility must both resist and hack systems, devices, and tech with an awareness of the non-innocence that is inherent in technoscience, embodying a practice Science and technology studies scholar and feminist philosopher Donna Haraway calls “modest witnessing”.
The lineage of Crip Technoscience had also already permeated the Hackers & Designers camp by the time I had arrived. Earlier on in the camp, the workshop Criptastic Hack Meeting: Riding / Snorkeling / Surfing and Burrowing into Time Undercurrents led by the Hackers & Designers Cooperative members Anja Groten, Pernilla Manjula Philips, and Heerko van der Kooij had its first session introducing participants to “Crip time” as conceptualized by feminist, queer and disability scholar Alison Kafer.
Crip time is a concept that Kafer uses to challenge and imagine new ways of understanding and engaging with time that also embraces and acknowledges lived realities and embodiments outside of normative modes, practices, and engagements.
This edition of the Criptastic Hack Meeting held at the camp is a continuation of a larger project Anja, Pernilla, and Heerko have developed together with Berlin-based collective MELT (Ren Loren Britton & Iz Paehr).
I attended the second session of the Criptastic Hack Meeting where we reimagined time by hacking, repurposing, and reprogramming e-ink wristwatches, using a combination of technical coding and analog prototyping. Anja, Pernilla, and Heerko assisted us in our session to find new ways to remake, encode, and use these programmable e-ink wristwatches that could distribute resources of information, mediate different forms of being in space and time, and challenge users to rethink not only “access” but also the act of sharing and communicating “access needs”.
Speculative Sports Day and Grandma’s Footsteps
The Criptastic Hack Meeting was not the only setting encouraging reimaginings as a form of unruly undercurrents and everyday piracy. On my second day at the camp, I attended Speculative Sports Day led by multidisciplinary artist Sade (aka EXICON) and prisoner solidarity organiser and abolitionist educator Sid. Sade and Sid guided us through reimagining sports by rethinking and confronting ideas about the rituals and values placed on games and gameplay.
Sharing our favourite childhood games, we collectively sought to question the facilitation of open-ended choices in games and what kinds of value systems determine “good possibilities” vs. potentially less desirable ones.
This session was filled with laughter and gameplay as our intergenerational group of participants shared games that were nostalgic for some and new for others, invented games that no one, to our knowledge, had ever played before. The prototyping for these invented games was guided by Sade and Sid’s outline game design chart that offered gaming categories such as games working with post-apocalyptic themes, card-based games, and the sneaking game format called grandma’s footsteps, which we collectively learned goes by many other names depending on where in the world you are.
We also hacked familiar games, such as hide-and-seek, with multiple rounds of testing out different variations aimed at modding the rules and mechanics of the game, which opened the space for new non-normalizing ways to relate to embodiment, play, and performance.
You and the World Wide Web: let’s work it out on the remix
“To fabulate digital online spaces felt like a resurrection of a forgotten language from my past.”
The ways that cultural value systems are connected to mechanisms and systems of interaction also emerged in the workshop Website Fabulations led by developer, designer and artist Doriane Timmermans. Joining in during the second session of the workshop, I found myself deeply immersed in the collective etherpad where workshop participants were enthusiastically coding different cross-website fictions using cascading stylesheets (CSS) that would reimagine the ways the web could be and function.
Collectively exploring these possible website modifications highlighted how in recent years the prominence of user-customisation for web pages has been positioned in opposition to the web design user interfaces passed off by ever-growing web-based corporations. As someone who spent large chunks of their childhood and early teen years on MySpace and Tumblr, these current uses of CSS to fabulate digital online spaces felt like a resurrection of a forgotten language from my past, inspiring also a more nostalgic sense of wonder about all the potential that existed with earlier communal web spaces.
Doriane cites the framework for the workshop as being inspired by notions of tactical design, referencing the design approach of interaction designer and design researcher Nolwenn Maudet to deploy design in the context and in the face of what is already existing. Within tactical design, there is a friction between the choices of user experience of the individual and the standard as it has been set to global normative experiences of the web. Using browser extensions as possible format for tactical design, the group sought to explore the boundaries of how the web can be fabulated to resist standard modes of operation and experience.
Some possible fabulations being encoded during the workshop included a web that is only visible if two users are present at the same time, a web that splits in two on your screen every time a link is clicked, a web that is only image-based, or a web where everything was editable.
Piracy: a culture of co-ownership, co-authorship, mutual respect and accountability
On the last evening of the camp, we gathered around the final recording session of the Pirat(e)s Radio shared in a sense of collective finality as we had reached the end of the 10th day of the Hackers & Designers camp. Our last hack for practising everyday piracy was shared by radio host and Hackers & Designer Cooperative member Juliette Lizotte who read out a text of Nous Sommes Partout “Everyday Piracy”.
Juliette’s recitation breathed life back into the words read out that reminded all of us: “If the space you inhabit defines you as a user, it’s because you are dominated by it, because the great net of discipline does not provide you with the scissors you need to cut out a liveable zone”.
These small acts—these disruptions, playful imaginaries, frictional practices, acts of resistance, moments of generative and communal making—are ongoing processes, as we leave the camp committed and continuing on as everyday pirates.
Lyndsey Walsh is Makery’s resident columnist for Rewilding Cultures during the summer of 2024.