Electromagnetic Field 2026

1st of August, 2026

Last month I went to my first ever Electromagnetic Field festival. It made me very happy and filled me with a hopeful joy that I have not felt for a very long time. I don’t have much else to say right now, but here are some links to some photos and stories.

For those who haven’t heard of it before, EMF is a festival that takes place every two years, all about “making stuff”. I had thought that it would be entirely code/programming/software/computer focussed, but that was not the case at all. It was just a couple thousand passionate nerds sharing their special interests and coming together to volunteer to enable a true community for a long weekend. The toilets break down? No problem: there’s somebody who just really loves plumbing and water systems and knows exactly how to fix them. The internet drops out? An old printing machine needs fixing? You need a weirdly specific screwdriver? No problem no problem no problem.

I was already excited about all the talks (which, by the way, are now all freely available online), and some of the workshops (I soldered a custom Guitar Hero controller with a PCB that somebody had designed just for EMF), but I had no idea how much of my time would just be spent walking around and marvelling and giggling ludicrously at all the art installations and random stickers and posters and pinboards and joke “villages” and landline phones (in a field? so bizarre and so great) and having conversations with random strangers. It was also so queer, and so joyfully so.

As I said at the top, it’s been a very long time since technology (in any of its forms) has brought me joy, let alone optimism. But EMF re-radicalised me to move from describing a future in terms of rejection of existing narratives to one in terms of positive potentials.

Here are two threads of photos on Mastodon: