EMF Camp 2024

My second time at EMF Camp! My feet hurt and my eyes are struggling to stay open, which in this case simply means I had an amazing time. Like EMF Camp 2022 I was delighted to see a huge LGBTQ+ representation. I helped by zip tying a progress pride flag to my tent :)

This post will mostly be a photo dump, but to summarise - there are no places I feel so comfortable while surrounded by so many people. EMF Camp is a special place.

James and I went down in the van pretty early on Thursday morning, hauling a bunch of Nottingham Hackspace bits and pieces. It was tiring and we spent most of the day relaxing.

Our village was starting to take shape and we even put out some stickers.

Garth built a tildagon themed board for doing some projection mapping. The effect was really great once set up properly and the animation was excellent.

There was also a very cool flip-dot display.

lasers! LED matrix displays!

Managed to get myself a cool EMF Camp 2024 patch and some much needed sun cream (hence the slimy hands). The opening talk was great too :)

Someone very kindly gave me a rainbow hexpansion 🏳️‍🌈

You can see that even within the first day, we were really getting through the Club-Mate.

More pride flags!

Unfortunately I don't think I got a photo, but Tim Hunkin (the man himself!) gave a talk about the history of electric shocks. Both informative and entertaining.

On the Friday evening a bunch of us went to the Hackers screening. Robyn got me a small pager pin badge while getting popcorn. The director, Iain Softley, was there to introduce the film and later did a Q&A alongside the animator Paul Franklin. Let me tell you that there's no better therapy than screaming "HACK THE PLANET" with a room full of nerds multiple times throughout the film. During the Q&A, Iain was able to get hold of and bring some of the costumes from the film - the jackets of Dade and Kate!

Afterwards we went to the pub (at which point 4388 pints had been served) and drank it under a weird fire thing!

I bumped into Matt who does a lot of the electrical installation for the festival and asked for a tour of one of the generators. It was great to see some of the gear.

Next I watched some of the Hacky Races.

… and played with a Tektronix storage CRT terminal (there was a talk on this later).

Someone came to get their hackspace passport stamped!

and I went on trek to photograph all the telephones.

and took some photos of other things on that walk too.

There was also the talk on storage CRTs which was interesting to learn more about.

On Saturday morning I helped run a beginners soldering workshop which went pretty well I think. Plus a few more photos.

Since it was dark I got to have a proper play with the Tektronix 4006. I took a macro shot of the display too, which lets you see the cones!

The lounge was a really nice place to be this EMF.

Then off for a walk around Null Sector.

Jon enjoyed the generative image thing which takes produces images from a video feed.

On Sunday morning Becky ran an excellent tie dying workshop! In the afternoon I did a volunteer shift for Stage C heralding.

And then it was our last night there. :(

Warning, bit loud, but very cool. Hanging out in Null Sector is a cool experience, although I don't dance.

Monday morning the deconstruction began.

Tags: emfcamp