At EMF 2026, the Electromagnetic Film team showed „Apollo 13” on an original 35mm print, which – of course – includes the famous movie quote by flight director Gene Kranz: „Failure is not an option”.

Contrary to that, EMF 2026 showed that with a fantastic community and in the spirit and vibe of the event, failure IS an option and should be embraced and valued.

Take, for example, Sam „Look Mum No Computer” Battle. He did a „Flamethrower organ mk3 being towed by a road legal ride on lawnmower” show and tell, where the organ wasn’t finished, the battery died, nothing worked as planned or intended, but everyone still had a great time.

The audience provided starterpacks, batteries and MIDI keyboards to get the show going, showed great patience and when Sam started to apologize, they told him to stop as everyone there had multiple unfinished, broken, not working projects of their own. We have all been there! If you take a clinical look from the outside on the time slot, the show and tell was a failure. But no-one in the audience felt that way. Sam did a great job in entertaining the audience and the audience went with it, having a blast.

Or take Jonathan’s blog post about EMF Art & Installations. In there, he describes how the Arts & Installation team tries to deal with failures be encouraging:

More than one of the installations that we accepted for EMF 2026 didn’t go to plan. I never felt that anyone let us down and actively encouraged people to bring what they had and talk about it. Some of my favourite work was half-finished or broken. In particular, Nervous Squirrel’s calculator orrery failed part way into the festival and I have never been more proud of an artist when, instead of packing it down, he left it in place with the broken belt there to see and a note explaining what had gone wrong and how he would do it again differently.

And the same goes for the amazing EMF Orga/Event Operations team, to which I was allowed to contribute a small part to. On of the mantras that everyone in eventops repeated countless times was: „Mistakes happen. Don’t worry too much about it. JUST TELL US, so we can fix it.” And they created a atmosphere where this rang true. Which caused everyone to „relax” and, at least in my recollection, less mistakes happened. Because you knew, if I fuck up, there is someone else to make it right without much fuss. And if someone else made a mistake, you pitched in to fix that without hesitation or a big blame game.

EMF 2026 felt so good, liberating and safe, I am lost for words to describe it in a better way. I am really looking forward to EMF 2028.

And if you are an artist (and we all are!), think about submitting a talk, workshop, show and tell or art installation to EMF. It is definitely worth it! Especially if it fails in spectacular ways :D

Tagged as: art, community, emf, event, failure, maker, support | Author: Martin Leyrer
[Samstag, 20260725, 14:08 | permanent link | 0 Kommentar(e)