A few weeks ago, we had our second experience of the wonderful community that is the Electromagnetic Field festival.
The EMF24 sign: solar panel, water installations, and recycled circuitboards.
Electromagnetic Field [background here] is also known as EMF or #emfcamp – a festival initiated by Jonty Wareing and Russ Garrett over a decade ago. It is entirely, and wonderfully, volunteer-run and community-oriented.
We first went to EMF two years ago, and that time, took a car filled up with a lot of camping gear, and as many gadgets as I could cram in alongside. For some reason, the only place I wrote much about that trip was in my newsletter… which I have been neglecting a lot, much like this blog. On that trip, we camped near to the Guild of Makers, had no particular expectations, and just had a fantastic time exploring and learning. I built an RC2014 Micro in one of the workshops, and went to some great talks.
A Plan
This year, with our Forge & Craft studio becoming more established, we wanted to do something more. I submitted two talks, one of which was accepted; we applied to be a part of the Null Sector Night Market; and, with all of the maker stuff we wanted to take along, we decided to hire a camper van and set up an area for drop-in workshops around our craft (pen plotting, vinyl cutting, heat pressing, sublimation et al… I didn’t take a 3D printer as well, but did seriously consider it!).
We even made a sign. Previous tenants of our studio had left a gigantic empty frame in the storage area, which we repurposed with some plywood and paint (the next upgrade will probably include some LEDs, but I didn’t have the time before the event to make those happen this time around).
A large square wooden frame painted white, with a Forge & Craft logo and URL in dark blue.
About ten days before we were due to set off, the owner of the camper we’d booked let us know that the boiler was leaking and that we’d have no hot water, but on balance, that was a compromise we were OK with… The van (named Louna, and hired through Quirky Campers) was lovely, beautifully kitted out, straightforward to drive, and it worked really well for us, even when we had some mud-related challenges getting parked up at the top north east corner of the EMF site, and getting back off that spot on the morning that we left (our wonderful neighbours were good enough to give us a quick push off to get us on our way).
The Experience
There are a number of other write-ups of how folks experienced EMF 2024, and pretty much all of them have different content and highlight different things, many of which are things that I missed around the site. That is to say – EMF has a lot of diverse and interesting things to discover.
This time I felt like an experienced hand, even as someone that had only been along once before. It turned out that several of my friends were going to be there for the first time, and had already sought advice and made connection with me about travel, planned location etc. We ended up parked at the far top corner of the site, opposite Null Sector, but also close to the Guild of Makers village that we were again loosely affiliated with (also, we’re thrilled about the MBE awarded to our brilliant GoM friend Dr Lucy Rogers!). It turns out that having a surrounding sheet of steel to sleep inside was reasonably sound-insulating compared to a tent, so we did mostly manage to get some sleep, despite the proximity to the loud late-night music generation zone!
There are far Too Many Things to write about in detail, here is but a small flavour:
Talks
I went to a handful of talks, there were too many on my planned schedule across the 4 days, but realised I would never see everything so I sniped at some key ones and resolved to catch up on recordings of others when possible.
- I finally saw Ellie Huxtable talk about shell history with Atuin (I missed this talk at FOSDEM although did get to meet Ellie there, and she was unable to join State of Open Con, so I’m glad to have seen this!). I’m now gradually installing and learning Atuin on each device and system I regularly use.
- Love love loved Shan Sun‘s talk about becoming a maker! So interesting, and a reminder that folks from all kinds of backgrounds can find joy in creating things. Shan’s lighthouses installation in Null Sector was also really cool.
- The talk about Tiny Toolkits was really good, and has caused me to add an array of small and handy tools to my “wanted” lists…!
- There was a fun talk about connecting Arduino boards to the web, which had some great demos inside it.
- Lucy gave an inspiring talk about looking Up, and the science above our heads.
- After my experience (and illegal treatment) by the company that used to be Twitter UK as directed by the new owner, I found the discussion about Why Tech Needs Unions very interesting. A topic about which I now, in middle age, have a lot of Thoughts, which I may share at some point.
- Martin Hamilton‘s fabulous rewind to the 1990s session about the origins of web search and how AI and capitalism have largely ruined things, was great. After briefly flirting with some other options, I’m now mostly using SearXNG for my search needs where I can. Be More Goat! 🐐
For my own time on stage, it was exciting to be able to deliver a new version of a talk I’d previously delivered as a 45 minute closing keynote, in a more focused 20 minute slot. I talked about the history of computer art and pen plotters – computer-driven drawing machines – and how I’ve now built several of them. There was, however, an A/V bump in the road, so I definitely lost a bit of the content along the way when I had to reboot halfway though 😬 video to follow, on this one. You can find the related links and notes here.
Thanks to my friend Jacqui for taking some nice photos of me on stage!
Sights
As with the talks, so so many things I could mention here, and still more things we did not see. Let’s summarise a few:
- the on-site (wired) phone system was, once more, a delight – it made me a bit sad that I didn’t bring anything to plug into it, again.
- a man played a Theremin to drive the output of a Tesla coil.
- there was a series of murder mystery games involving the death of our beloved Clippy. I did not play these, but loved the idea and execution and heard that a lot of people did get involved in solving the crime!
- A physical version of Flappy Bird! Just brilliantly executed, I loved it.
This was in the main bar; the whole of the Arcade (a separate space) was also fantastic, although I did not have a lot of time to explore. I was excited to see some games there built using Downpour, which I recently talked about on our weekly podcast. - The most engaging and intriguing installation for me was Shadowplay (inside Null Sector), from Joseph Lindley, Roger Whitham, and Jesse Benjamin. An absolutely fascinating live demonstration of image diffusion [aka generative AI] effects applied to video capture. No particular reason, except that it was cool. I could have played in there for ages!
Playing with the Shadowplay installation
Hacks
On to the physical “making” I got involved with…
- in 2022 I missed a workshop I was interested in on Building a Tiny Satellite Ground Station; this time, I successfully made it in. I enjoyed the experience of building a small 1⁄4-Wave Ground Plane Antenna and hooking it up to TinyGS running on a LilyGo LoRA board.
- When I got home, I excitedly started to poke around in the TinyGS project, but it seems a bit tricky to get involved with – only parts of it are open source / source-available, and the community discussion is largely on Telegram. I’m finding myself more frustrated than I’d like – I definitely would love to contribute to documentation and so forth, but have not really found a way to do so. It is fun to set up, but (my impression is that it is) not so easy to take it further. Back burner, and I may give up on it if I can’t figure out how to help and get helped.
- The Tildagon badge is great! I really enjoyed following it from announcement, through pre-event discussion, to collecting mine at the event and continuing to figure out what is possible afterwards.
- Before EMF I tentatively printed up a few plastic addon Hexpansions, and some folks were able to confirm that they should fit, so I made a set of simple spirit level pieces, which other attendees seemed to enjoy. I’ll be making more, and you can find the designs on Printables as well. I like the concept that a hexpansion can be anything from a piece of card, through to a fully-functional electronic peripheral which contributes software to the main badge, and that we can continue to iterate on this design in the future.
The Magic
On Friday, we had a spot in the Night Market. We loved the experience of being there, talking to people about pen plotters and our art (and also, encouraging folks to come to see us at the pop-up by our camper, or to my talk), and making some sales. This was our first time selling as Forge & Craft outside of our own open studios, and a very different audience.
Our stand in the Night Market, selling plots, prints, and a few HexpansionsA very busy Night Market
The only tiny piece of feedback I had was that the Night Market space itself was relatively small for the amount of footfall and traffic that came through – we could easily have used a full table, and having a bit more space for visitors may have made it feel a little less crammed in – nonetheless, Thank You so much to the organisers for having us, it was an absolutely great experience and we barely noticed the time rush by up until the 1am (!) close!
One more magical thing was that this was an event at which Mastodon and the Fediverse came into their own!
- Ahead of the event, I put together a Fediwall to track associated hashtags and accounts across a range of popular and related Mastodon servers. As EMF approached, the chatter became more noticeable, and I began to follow a lot of interesting folks I had not been aware of.
- My old friend James Smith proposed a Fediverse Friends meetup – which unfortunately overlapped with our Night Market time, but there were two of us to man our stall, so I was able to pop out and put some faces to Fediverse handles. I even brought Mastodon stickers and (for the fortunate few who got one) some magnets as well. Even if you were not at the meetup, hopefully you may have found a cheeky Mastodon logo sticker waiting to be collected somewhere else on the site 🦣 😉
- A key element was that every organising team at the event was on the Fediverse (specifically, GoToSocial, which is what their server uses, but easily followable on Mastodon, thank you ActivityPub), and attendees could use that to keep up with announcements and news. And, in the end, the wonderful @DrLucyRogers joined in the fun!
- There were installations that connected to the Fediverse! Fabulous! This really felt like the early days of Web 2.0 platforms again, to some extent – it could easily have been 2010 all over again, with a dot matrix printer that sat in the main bar printing out Mastodon posts with the specific hashtag (thank you Matt Gray!), and a fax machine in the Null Sector bar that took in physically doodled images and posted them on Mastodon.
A dot matrix printer, printing Mastodon posts “MastoDot”
A post from the author, printed on a dot matrix printer
Fax To Fedi, a fax machine connected to the Fediverse
A very poorly-drawn Forge & Craft logo, with the text
#emf2024, posted via fax to an image on Mastodon
The Feeling
This.
I came back feeling energised and enriched, having reconnected with my communities. We had a great time.
Roll on 2026. Thank you to everyone involved.
Postscript: I did some babbling about EMF on the podcast a couple of weeks ago, as well, just at the start. Why not take a listen?
https://andypiper.co.uk/2024/06/20/energized-mood-flux/
#art #camping #community #emf2024 #emfcamp #forgeAndCraft #making #penplotter #publicSpeaking #Technology #volunteering
