Individual Project

The Hackers & Designers Summer Academy 2022 'Connecting Otherwise' takes place July 16–23 in 4 different interconnected locations: in Amsterdam, The Netherlands with @hackersanddesigners, in Aotearoa (formerly known as New Zealand) with NEWS, in Berlin, Germany (+ online) with MELT, and in Seoul, South-Korea with DDDUG.

Participants will be able to join one of the locations (nodes). All nodes will facilitate – in their own ways – the same workshop program. There will be moments in which all nodes will connect and there will be times where we follow workshops asynchronously. This edition is an experiment in decentralized organization and strives to connect the different nodes, while attuning to and leveraging the different local contexts.

Connecting Otherwise
Living in a global pandemic for the last two years made apparent how our internet use impacts our co-habitation with each other – other humans, other species – in social, material and psychological ways. The evolving monoculture of the handful of companies that mediate our online connectivity, as well as their pervasiveness and extractivist nature, has created a condition in which it is difficult to imagine alternative, affective, and sustainable ways of coexisting and connecting online.

Within the theme of 'Connecting Otherwise': we will explore the intersections of accessibility and sustainability of hybrid cultural work and techno-social life—the cultural, economical, ecological, and geographical implications of our increasingly complex entanglements with technology.

This year's summer academy will be facilitated and co-constructed with collectives that work in their respective local environments at the intersection of art, design and technology, environmental, queer, trans* and disability justice, free/libre/open source software development, and radical pedagogies. Together, we invite participants to join us in questioning, reimagining and putting into practice other conscious, creative, and response-able ways of working, creating, and co-existing online.

Read the open call and presentation of each of the 4 nodes on the H&D website

As a member of the collective Hackers & Designers (H&D), Anja Groten co-organizes the Hackers & Designers Summer Academy 2022.