Our newbie perspective on Electromagnetic Field 2026

On our particular Mastodon instance, Electromagnetic Field (EMF; #EMFCamp on the socials), a festival held every even-numbered year, is not something you could miss becoming aware of. Hence, we (that is James and me) have known it exists since its last outing in 2024. But it’s got to be the ultimate of fediverse influence to actually take that one stage further and buy tickets.

And then some imposter’s syndrome started to set in about it.

To back up a bit, EMF isn’t a music festival, although there’s plenty of music; however, what it is notoriously defies simple explanations.

I eventually settled with saying a hackspace/makerspace festival, and that you really need to visit the festival website to understand more! You might say a nerdy festival, where nerd is only ever positive, or perhaps it’s a festival of “beautiful queer techno hippies” who “like computers and camping” (as per John Robertson; see below).

It’s also entirely (and I do mean entirely, from the organisation to the physical, with the latter including some enormous tents, bars, a nightclub built out of shipping containers through to water, power to the tents, WiFi and phone networks) done by volunteers (the festival itself is not for profit).

Tickets are actually fairly hard to come by; each release generally sells out in about a minute, and we’d not been ‘influenced’ enough to initially try for that!

But after a few attempted breaks away going quite wrong (be that emergencies or heat waves), I happened to check the website at just the right moment to snag a pair of returns with 10 days to go. (Note, we did later see unofficial ticket exchanges happening even up to the day before, if you’re OK with really last-minute plans.)

The primary motivation for going was just to do something different, go somewhere where you were bound to get away from depressing news, especially tech presented through the voice of billionaires, and instead see tech as run by ‘ordinary’ people.

But so, yeah, then there’s that imposter syndrome – as we were now following the hashtag, I was seeing so many social media posts about those preparing their talks, their mega installations, their costumes… and lots and lots and lots of LEDs attached to it all.

OK, we’re not untechy as it goes (James studied physics and now works in computing and, even if I was trained as a biologist and don’t have a tech job, I do use Linux and have this static site blog), but this was all truly another level. Neither of us really do gaming and, for example, certainly don’t have the creativity or technical skills to knock up a corporate-goose-based text adventure on the fly in a couple of weeks. I’d also never even held a soldering iron.

So, with that preamble, what did we actually do and what do we wish we had done?

I will say EMF’s pages on what to expect and what to bring are broadly excellent, and it’s fair to categorise most of the activities into talks, performances, music (the schedule splits this between DJs and other), workshops, installations, films and other meet ups.

The one tip I could add was I was very glad I’d done a print out of my favourites from the schedule on a bit of paper. In a field, in bright sun, it’s just a lot easier than navigating a screen!

Most of my favourites were the talks, and it’s talks that I still feel are core to what the festival is about during the day.

I’d favourited talks on everything from ethics as a tabletop role-playing game, viruses, the menopause, how to talk to animals, through the maths of knitting, robotics, hedgehogs, microscopy, horror props, MRI, photography, home assistant, pigeons, trains, synthesisers and data visualisation, to bird watching, the internet and hovercraft… and that was me trying to be very selective.

Reading in advance, a core piece of newbie advice is you can’t do everything! You sure can’t.

I did get to some of those talks, and some others, but also missed out plenty of them, as I was distracted by other things going on, or just resting. Or they clashed.

I was also able to book into a workshop with the creator of an electromagnetic-frequency-sensing badge kit (workshops are generally way oversubscribed, but there’s a lottery for 50% of the spaces), and 2 hours on a Sunday afternoon takes a bit away from other stuff.

Thursday

So first things first, and that’s getting there. It’s possible to get to Ledbury station (from where there’s a shuttle bus) on the train, but east–west travel is tricky, and eventually we reluctantly decided it would be better to drive, especially if we could manage to lift share. All kudos to the person who cycled there from London.

As it turned out, yes, we were able to offer a lift, but only to one person! We did fill the entire of our modestly sized car boot with stuff, and that’s taking nothing more than essential clothes and basic camping gear (no cooking equipment). And a DECT (landline) phone.

Having just about picked up our liftee on time after breakfast at our local cafe, it’s then a 3-hour drive, as you have to go quite a long route or quite a slow route. But all went smoothly, and we found ourselves in said eponymous field in Herefordshire.

One thing you can’t escape in any festival is that the experience is bound to be affected by weather. It was really a bit horridly hot, especially Thursday and Friday, and that also meant much dust. It definitely made you feel for the volunteers doing check in, and even more so for those who had it equally sweltering over the previous week of set up. It was bad enough carting a small tent into place (no trolley).

It wasn’t super easy to work out where to camp. As we’d gathered it would be beforehand, most attendees indeed go in friendship groups or ‘villages’. At 4pm on Thursday, you really had to find somewhere to squeeze in between the groups. Eventually, we ended up in a spot just east of the large village of ‘Glastonledburyshire-on-Severn’ and nearby to a family and friends group with parents and some (adult) teenagers, and two other smaller groups.

After that, a pint in the bar was very welcome.

And then we met ‘world o techo’ (a trolley/robot that is pushed around and creates music depending on your location). This was the start of us realising some stuff at EMF can be utterly irritating and yet utterly endearing all at once. (There was also a fabulous Henry hoover bot wheeling itself around blasting out music, but not being so grass suited, it tended to keep itself to itself a bit more.)

I’m still earwormed by the sound – but luckily you can mock it up from source if you want the vibe. I still don’t know how it magically appeared absolutely everywhere and everywhen; I’m assured there’s only one of them.

Thursday evening saw us first at the cèilidh (Bunny Eye Cèilidh Band; no link, as they appear to be Facebook only). Injuries prevented participation, but it’s always amusing to watch, and the caller was a lot of fun (S2, Ep5 of Gavin and Stacey; she told us she’d been living on that for 19 years).

This was followed by improvisation comedy from John Robertson’s The Dark Room. Now, I’d vaguely come across this before, but it was clearly much better known by the majority. It works surprisingly well both ways – you won’t see spoilers by watching.

A few events do need you to be up on some EMF in-jokes, but spiders and ducks had been explained on the website, and yes, the fediverse had sorted us knowing about the orphan source incident and Club Mate.

However, even for those who knew it well (Darrens), The Dark Room turned into a exposition of “I like computers and camping” as we had an extra 30 mins of technical issues. (John kept it going through 1000 people all shouting “test, test, test” as per the username on his rebooting laptop.)

As I overheard someone say on leaving, “I’ve seen some weird [bleep] comedy in my time, but that was [bleep, bleep] weird”.

That took us to a ‘relatively’ early night in festival terms, but welcome after the drive and heat.

Back at the tent, it was fun by proxy as Glastonledburyshire kicked off their radio, the sound equivalent of shitposting, “All hail our glorious dictatorship; all hail Connor, our glorious leader”. (Didn’t I mention irritating, yet endearing).

Friday

‘Big’ Tesco they said. Well, the EMF website just says Tesco, but ‘big’ seems to be the usual designation. OK, another in-joke… Ledbury does not have a big Tesco (tbf Baldock Tesco is one of the largest in the country occupying the 1920s ‘Bondor’ building).

Anyway, it did have some breakfast pastries, snacks, juice and lunch (I’m just reminded I actually forgot to check out the small shop EMF have on site).

Then it was onto the talk programme (although we were not back in time for the opening ceremony).

I should make clear (not counting a few like Robin Ince and Colin the Mathmo), we’re not talking professional tech/science communicators, so there’s some variability in the quality of the talks depending on public-speaking experience etc.

I also appreciate it’s rather difficult to do talks for a general but techy audience; for instance, I couldn’t follow the detail in a talk on synthesisers, but then James found the same for ‘you are part virus’. That said, all weekend, there was only one talk where I really didn’t take away anything from it.

I’m still just in awe of the variety… when James and I first compared our favourites, my initial reaction was “they’re completely different to mine!” (although we did have a few shared).

Talk of the day for me was the one on scanning tunnelling microscopes; I just enjoyed the idea of real science being done in a ‘home-lab’-ish set up given it wouldn’t go down too well to crash the microscope probe into the sample on the expensive commercial version.

Evening, and we were back into music and comedy. I did Excel Comedy & Mathem-antics (not recorded). Whoop, I was not ignorant of all the Excel tricks. There were more ‘technical’ difficulties – this time Copilot not doing what was intended, although that went down quite well.

Meanwhile, James took his tin whistle off to the folk sessions. Someone had taken the effort to make a song book (and the Irish section was full of tunes he knew).

As dark fell, it was time for lasers and flames (alcohol, not petroleum). And the nightclub (NullSector).

Saturday

Apparently some work has been done so that the NullSector bass doesn’t blast out quite so much. If you’re up in the north part of the campsite though, of course you’ll still hear it; however, it’s actually surprisingly OK to sleep through.

Night-time did get fairly cold, and then quite quickly, the sun heats your tent up to the degree that you’re forced to get up. The outside temperature on site was actually briefly really pleasant in the 8–10 am window.

So what do you do at that time? Go to the NotAParkrun of course.

Now, I’m not a fast runner (I can only run–walk 5 k even on the flat), and upon arriving at the start line it was clear that the participants were likely skewed towards the faster end of things. Eeek. However, I’m used to being at the tail, and stuck to my plan. Except I also couldn’t run even the modest hill over the uneven ground, and that was with an adjusted route to avoid ‘big hill’. Oops, my watch’s run–walk program was 30 s too short for my 50 mins 30 s.

All seriousness, it’s actually a lovely part of the UK, and good to get out and try and keep up the fitness routine. And you get a nice certificate for it!

James wasn’t sure about collecting this, but I needed my reward, although it has got a bit crumpled since. Especial thanks to Havoctechie who took time out of their honeymoon to set up the route, motivational signs and make sure we all got safely round the course.

I’ve never found running invigorating, in fact rather I find it anti-invigorating, so it was lunchtime before I’d recovered.

More talks. First up was good stuff on the reality of menopause (although I must warn, has slop images that for me felt stereotyped). Tim Hunkin was also engaging with his talk on his decades of experience with arcades, and then there was a bit of a train theme in what else I got to, with a talk on the Tango 22 railway signal (not recorded) and train scheduling (or why the 16:20 from Cardiff leaves 4 minutes early).

James again attended the folk session. This had to contend with being next to an art installation, ‘the grid’, which consisted of an array of vertical LED strips with ever changing patterns, but that also occasionally produced a rhythmic clicking noise not timed to the music! It was also the only session he’s been to that included the surreal sight of a parade of furries emerging from the grid and passing by the musicians while the tunes played.

And as you’ve guessed is the core essence of the late evening, music and nightclubs. James stayed a lot later than I did.

Sunday

It was very early (4 am-ish) that someone in the group behind us crashed loudly into a table and hopped around cursing a bit (they were OK), which was then followed by the teenagers returning chatting about their night playing chess in the bar, but I staggered up knowing that there wasn’t much on my schedule for the morning. This time I could enjoy the cool part of the day.

Cue a queue for the festival-priced sweet pancakes. And getting dratted Nutella all over me.

“Hello?”
“Are you the goose person”
“I mean...”
“Where's the goose”
This is a totally normal telephone call in 2026. #EMFCamp

James, however, had a plan, and that was to get back to the arcade to play GooseVenture, which was back up after he’d failed in his first attempt to find it (technical issues, so it really wasn’t there).

James does remember the conversation above more as “Hello, is that the author of GooseVenture?”, “I’m at the arcade, they can’t find it and they aren’t sure if it’s real?…” 😉.

Anyway, his review: GooseVenture, best [redacted] employee sim ever. Find your way through an emotional journey to balance goose wellbeing with the corporate ethos. The need for IT support before we could even start adding goose value only made it more perfect.

I realise at this point, I haven’t explained the phones. Basically, the whole site is turned into one big DECT (and others) network, and if you bring certain DECT phones, you can register a number for people to ring you, or set up a service for giggles (e.g. C0WS for moos). Mind, we all gravitate towards Gigaset handsets, meaning we tend to share ring tones; hence, working out it’s you ringing is a game in itself.

There are also public phones throughout the site, and it’s not unlikely you’ll pass one as it rings. This might be a simple reminder to rehydrate (not unwelcome in the heat; nothing is going to spoil a hot festival like forgetting how much extra you need to drink). But it also might be a random dial.

Only at EMF.

Next was my soldering workshop. Now, I guess soldering is quite a core skill if you’re part of a hackspace, but it’s not one I’d ever done, and not one James had done since a long-ago physics degree practical.

The workshop was run by Darcy Neal, and the aim was to complete their funky badge kit. I did sort of wonder if it was going to take up the full 2 hours. Well, for most it did not, but for me it certainly did.

I have to admit, I found the soldering more frustrating than fun, even having remembered to bring my reading glasses. I notably made a right mess of soldering on the switch. But that’s all learning too, and I am really glad to have done it. It feels a very EMF’y experience!

It’s testament to clever design that despite my less-than-skilful efforts, it did work, so everything must have connected more or less right. (Darcy came round and, with my grateful permission, quickly reflowed a few connections at the end just to ensure robustness.) And I feel confident that if my switch does fall off, I could fix it.

I missed the explanation of how it worked, still doing soldering, but I’m assured by James his circuit understanding hasn’t regressed to the point he doesn’t get it, so will get him to talk me though that sometime soon.

While we were in hardware mode, finally (finally), we got round to making the Tildagon badge, an extra you can buy at festival registration. We’d managed to collect this on Friday but then stuff, or it just being dark, got in the way of making it. We’d been a little worried about this turning into e-waste, but now it feels nothing could be further.

I’m definitely going to learn a bit of micropython and make an app (myself, not GenAI), but, in the moment, it was just running around bagging a few of the ‘hexpansions’ hidden around the site by GCHQ.net (sadly, they were collecting them up, so even a fair few of the easy ones had been put away, but we got 17).

I’m sure the younger festival goers spent all weekend at it, but sometimes you just have to let your inner child out.

Snacks, a couple more talks (how not to make a random number generator stands out), and then the closing ceremony.

Although I’m sure 90% of attendees do recognise/know the main organisers, I am equally sure we absolutely are not the only who don’t!

Sometimes we might know the name, but not the face (especially for a social media profile such as Jonty’s). At other times, no clue.

Yes, I probably will say it in official feedback, but if the organisers on stage could just give a little more on who they are and what their role is, it might be a little less awkward for those not in the loop; the modesty on such an achievement as putting on a successful festival in a field for thousands perhaps doesn’t need to extend quite so far!

But for all the hundreds and hundreds of people who had roles big and small, it’s just a really big thank you. I hope any stress was made up for by the joy you gave us.

If I go again, and I don’t know how likely that is, I’ll try a bit harder to get to one of the 2-h volunteer sessions myself (all volunteers still pay for tickets). I can chop food at the very least I’m sure. This time, all the slots for things I could actually do went in only a few hours before I’d got round to looking it up!

Off to the bar, and two pints later (really not festival-priced at ~£5, and yes, we returned the glasses), I was in NullSector. I might have eye rolled the teenagers back at camp that morning with their declaration they would be there until the end, but at curfew at 00:30, I was equally there. Although my back was likely stiffer than theirs the next day.

I’ve got to commend the superb NullSector theming that turned shipping containers into a stonking space port; I’ve popped links to a few of the DJ mixes in the extra shots, but I’d recommend also checking out the ‘leaks’ on the ‘Polybius Biotech’ site.

Monday was just packing up and going home (no passengers this way). A detour was made to go to a posh cafe in Great Malvern (by posh, I mean ceramic plates, and metal knives and forks). Then finally back home to wash off the layers of dust and sun cream.

And process it all.

I’m saddened to say if we had done trains, yes, we’d have got stuck in London for hours (enough to recoup the train ticket cost mind).

Conclusions and regrets on stuff we missed

You can’t do it all.

But… if we were doing it again, both James and I feel we would have got the badge made up earlier and at the very least got to NullSector in the day to get inspired by the hexpansion market.

We could have made a bit more of the installations and visited a few more villages (noting it’s difficult to ‘people’ when you don’t know anyone there); we have no stamps stamped 🙁, and it would have been good to say hi to those running the GameBoy from our local hackspace.

We missed the planetarium, and overbrewed was likely amazing fun (we have a board game with a similar concept).

I also somehow didn’t see any of the 5 hours plus of the person doing the 14-disc version of the Tower of Hanoi despite the Maths Village being on route to our tent. James saw it, but didn’t know that’s what they were doing. We cheer it retrospectively.

Finally, I think it would have also been fabulous to learn more about electronic music, lasers and demoscenes (even if all air horns), but I just didn’t make any of those sessions. Nor any of the drop-in art activities (I’d brought my sketchbook, but it remained packed up).

Then, I can’t really think of anything I’d want to cut to do all that! Including that I needed some time chilling in the shade.

Even despite the minor regrets, that’s not to say we were completely devoid of amazing chance interactions; thanks to Lockpicking Village – James did try that; thanks to bagpipe Shaun for the chat and allowing the accompaniment, despite a tin whistle being in a different key.

Thanks to ‘Floppy’, Emily et al. for the telescope of the moon (and for admin’ing our Mastodon instance in the first place).

And thanks to whoever made the offering of the plastic rabbit in the cup holder. And to the person giving a sticker to everyone in the nightclub (my death skull was completely random, not selected).

All in all, what can we conclude but what an inspiration it all was. Thank you so so much.

---

Extra shots

More of EMF

• Videos of all the recorded talks
  https://emf.camp/watch
• A better variety of comments/pictures than I could give (pictures only show for a while; use the menu to see them on the original server)
  https://mastodon.me.uk/tags/emfcamp
• A Markov-chain-type bot that puts real EMF lore together in ways that could have happened
  https://martinh.net/@microEMF

Other blogs on EMF 2026

• Aaron S. Jackson
  https://aaronsplace.co.uk/blog/2026-07-20-emf-camp-2026.html
• Dr Laura James’s writings
  https://lbj20.blogspot.com/2026/07/electromagnetic-field-2026.html
• po-ru.com
  https://po-ru.com/2026/07/23/everything-i-learned-at-emf-2026
• alifeee’s blog
  https://blog.alifeee.net/emf-2026/
• billglover.me
  https://billglover.me/2026/07/28/emf-camp-2026/
• chris’s journal (also do check out the 2024 post for another newbie perspective)
  https://chris.dreamwidth.org/39662.html
• sam.pikesley.org
  https://sam.pikesley.org/blog/2026/07/22/emf-as-an-act-of-defiance/

On installations and other random projects

• Comments from the team lead for Art & Installations on what they do
  https://jonathanhogg.com/what-does-emf-art-installations-do/
• Sending a postcard to space
  https://ascender.limited/space-postcard
• Multiple arcade machine emulator (MAME) arcade games with lasers
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_NfC9PbZZbs
• Sound-reactive jellyfish
  https://learn.pimoroni.com/article/building-sound-reactive-jellyfish
• Whiteboard techno
  https://mewo2.com/2026/07/25/
• Speed-run computer-aided design with FreeCAD
  https://blog.freecad.org/2026/07/27/freecad-e-sport-speed-run-challenge-at-emf-camp-2026/
• Building the scale solar system
  https://spod.cx/blog/emf_2026_scale_solar_system/
• A giant Clues by Sam game
  https://fosstodon.org/@castaway/116917625710829368
• Some zines
  https://ko-fi.com/post/Zines-for-EMF-D5G0240L9B
• Making a tetrapod
  https://carina.org.uk/tetrapod.shtml
• Getting started with the live-coding environment strudel
  https://mastodon.social/@jtruk/116964022096446358
• Making an LED corset
  https://pocketsandpinafores.wordpress.com/2026/07/22/the-bumper-yes-i-made-another-led-corset-when-i-only-intended-to-make-a-skirt-because-scope-creep-is-a-problem-post/
• It really doesn’t matter if the project goes wrong
  https://martin.leyrer.priv.at/y2026/m07/EMF_2026-Failure_IS_an_Option.html

Some of this year’s DJ sets

• John Hegs
  https://www.mixcloud.com/johnhegs/emf-camp-2026/
• 2xAA
  https://www.mixcloud.com/2xAA/2xaa-dj-set-at-emf-2026/
• Mr Joshua
  https://www.mixcloud.com/MrJoshua/mrjoshua-emfcamp-electromagnetic-field-festival-2026/
• Tuftii
  https://www.mixcloud.com/tuftii/null-sector-set-emf-2026/
• Donk Devil
  https://soundcloud.com/donkfacts/electromagnetic-field-2026
• Edronik
  https://www.mixcloud.com/edronik/edronikvoid-emf26-null-sector/
• lpbkdotnet
  https://www.mixcloud.com/lpbkdotnet/lpbkdotnet-emfcamp-2026-sunday-8pm/

What’s with the goose?

• A corporate metaphor used in a shareholder presentation a couple of weeks before the festival that proved particularly meme worthy
  https://discuss.systems/@dev/116807460725864716