Participation

When even Thought for the Day on Radio 4 starts gloomily quoting from Revelations, refusing to offer glib words of comfort, you know something is off kilter in the world. Wild fires are raging in the US, in continental Europe, in Scotland. Maybe at this point it’s more comfortable to be a denier, to be able to see those images and hold fast to your belief that it’s ‘just weather’, that there’s no reason to change anything we’re doing. Last year I took a short course on nature writing with my local university. It was one of the sparks that led to this blog. Nature writing has maybe a comforting image, a close look at the beauty of the natural world, soaking up all that awe and wonder. But a person can’t spend time closely observing and trying to represent nature’s beauty without running headlong into the effects of the climate crisis. I hear it in my dad’s voice on the phone as we swap gardening notes, he is mourning for his parched garden, his unspoken worry about the world his grandchildren are growing up in.

Last weekend I went with my husband and our two teenage children to Electromagnetic Field 2026. It’s perhaps a difficult event to describe to anyone who hasn’t been there. I’ve had well-meaning friends express sympathy that I’ve been dragged away by my geeky husband to a hacker camp, with the suggestion that there would be nothing enjoyable there for me. And yes, over the weekend you can find knots of pale nerds coding in the shade of ancient oaks, and taking part in intense conversations about open source software. People bring robots that they have built, there are highly specific talks about rail timetable planning. But what most attracts me is the bandwidth of curiosity and playfulness, and because the people organising it are a particular type of people, there is a focus on problem-solving and iterating systems. It’s an event which attracts nearly 4,000 to a field in Herefordshire but is still completely volunteer-run and not for profit. There is definitely a punk aesthetic, doing the work that needs to be done. Because of the sheer diversity of activities on offer, each person experiences EMF Camp in their own way. You could get lucky and win a lottery for a workshop, which runs the span of technology from blacksmithing to circuit-building. Or spend time bouncing around the big tops listening to talks, with the tink tink of hammer on anvil sound-tracking the weekend.

In our late capitalist society, so many of our festivals have become a weirdly passive experience, no longer something that you participate in, instead just another consumer experience. Even the 300 core EMF Camp volunteers who put in huge contributions of time and effort, often meaning that they don’t get to actually see many of the talks on offer, pay for a ticket. Many other volunteer slots are released throughout the weekend, people to serve drinks in the bar, help in the busy volunteer canteen, announce speakers and run A/V tech in talks, comfort the unwell in the welfare tent. I and each of the over-18 members of my family took shifts over the weekend, as well as being a small part of making the event happen it’s a great way to meet people. Communal festivals are a technology for binding us social animals together. It is a really positive and hopeful thing to be a part of, to be reminded of human ingenuity, about what happens when humans care deeply about something and decide to work on it together.

One of the talks I saw was by Jonathan Hogg, who later in life gave up his career in investment banking and became an artist. He spends a lot of time working in primary schools on creative projects. He spoke about how even in the 17 years he had been doing this work, he increasingly sees children who are not confident in their creativity, they are losing the ability to experiment and enjoy making things. Using scissors and drawing are hard for many of them, things that would have been taken for granted as mundane kid entertainment a generation ago. This is not to blame the children, it's increasingly about children not being offered those free and open-ended opportunities to play, due to pressures of an over-stuffed curriculum. He made the point that it’s not as simple as poor fine motor control, it’s also about how you see yourself as a person, not thinking of yourself as a person who can make things happen, but instead being conditioned to think ‘will this help me pass a test’. It’s part of the massive lie adults tell children: pass enough tests and exams and you’ll be rewarded with a ‘good’ job. As if passing tests has an inherent value in itself, rather than being a sign of knowledge gained. I came home re-inspired to keep putting my energy into working directly with children, knowing that by being an interested adult I am providing something valuable.

Photo is from EMF Camp after dark, very important to adhere to Rule Zero. Last week I went straight from a dusty field into preparing for a job interview. Whilst I was ultimately unsuccessful, I had some good feedback from the panel, and it was a useful and overall positive experience. I have also realised that it's harder to protect my Monday writing day over the school holidays, but I'm trying to dig deep and post something once a week, even if I miss my self-imposed deadline.