Electromagnetic Field 2024

From Thursday 30th May up until early Monday 3rd June, I did something quite out of character for me: for the first time, I attended Electromagnetic Field (hereafter EMF) held at Eastnor Deer Park, about half-way between Hereford and Cheltenham in the West-South-West Sort Of Midlands. It was probably the single most crazy-in-a-good-way thing I've done for a few years. I'd been aware of EMF for a few years and had watched more than a few of the videos of talks from previous events. When it turned out that a friend of Emerson's had been to the 2022 edition, that pushed me over to deciding to actually go this year. I'm pretty damn sure it was an excellent decision to do so. A blow-by-blow would be not just self-indulgent but probably actually unhelpful, so I'll try to condense into bullet point lists where it could be useful and use prose as required for the more discursive parts.

"Electromagnetic Field is a non-profit camping festival for those with an inquisitive mind or an interest in making things: hackers, artists, geeks, crafters, scientists, and engineers. A temporary town of nearly three thousand like-minded people enjoying a long weekend of talks, performances, and workshops on everything from blacksmithing to biometrics, chiptunes to computer security, high altitude ballooning to lockpicking, origami to democracy, and online privacy to knitting. ((...)) Imagine a camping festival with a power grid and high-speed internet access; a temporary village of geeks, crafters, and technology enthusiasts that's lit up by night, and buzzing with activity during the day."

Two of my favourite adjectives are nice-mad and geekycool. You won't find them in dictionaries, but I expect their meanings are pretty intuitive, and it should be clear that I use them both as high praise. EMF, and its attendees, scored extremely highly on both fronts. ( A few thousand words about a remarkable long weekend. )