Femke Snelting develops projects at the intersection of publishing, trans*feminism and Free Software. With the Brussels-based association for art and media, Constant, she experimented with Free Culture as a trans*feminist practice through performative publishing, curatorial processes, poetic software, experimental research and educational prototypes. Her thinking about reuse was sharpened as part of her work with the Libre Graphics Movement in dialogue with the practice of Open Source Publishing (OSP), a design collective that she co-founded in 2006.
Currently Femke works in various constellations on re-imagining computational practices to disinvest from technological monoculture and the regime of The Cloud. With Miriyam Aouragh, Seda Gürses and Helen Pritchard she runs The Institute for Technology in the Public Interest, a trans-practice gathering of activists, artists, engineers and theorists on what computational infrastructures do to collective life. With Jara Rocha, she edited Volumetric Regimes: Material Cultures of Quantified Presence (Open Humanities Press, 2022). The publication resulted from a collective disobedient research project, which interrogated the concrete and at the same time fictional entities of “bodies” in the context of volumetric technologies.
Femke supports artistic research at MERIAN (Maastricht) and contributes to Nubo, a cooperative that provides locally hosted, Open Source digital services. In the context of SoLiXG, she develops Counter Cloud Imaginaries, non-sovereign institutional infrastructures and methods for infra-resistance. With the Infrastructural Rehearsals collective, she collaborates on proposals and interventions that challenge top-down hegemonic approaches to the climate crisis, from green-washing tech capitalists to state-sponsored initiatives.
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