One Of Our Spiders Is Missing

Hovercraft Parking, Spider Friendship Zones and Meowing Points were all the rage at EMF 2024

I’m very fond of the way that hacker culture positively encourages you to be playful with things like the branding for an event. Make it your own, have fun doing it, and make something whimsical if at all possible.

If you were at Electromagnetic Field (EMF) in 2024 you might have seen some silly signs that I created as my own contribution to what, if we’re honest, was already potentially the most whimsical event that weekend in Ledbury - if not the whole of Herefordshire. Here are some photos:

Photos of a variety of silly signs derived from the EMF 2024 Solarpunk event theme and zip tied to posts on the festival site. The signs are entitled Hovercraft Parking, Meowing Point, Spider Friendship Zone and Triffid Zone, and attributed to various unlikely festivals such as Equipped Mechanics Fix 2024, Extremely Mobile Feline 2024, Embarrassed Moose Frown 2024 and Exotic Mango Flavours 2024.

If you should find yourself in possession of (let’s say) some hacker oriented artwork etc that you are able to remix without falling foul of the copyright ogres that live under the bridge next to the patent trolls, then you might find the Inkscape open source vector graphics app useful for making a few… alterations, if you know what I mean:

Inkscape vector graphics editor showing EMF sign hacking in progress. The sign being made is Meowing Point, which has an ISO 7010 standard Personal Protective Cat Ear Headband next to a message which advises that cat ears must be worn at all times. The EMF Solarpunk logo has been altered to add a pair of eyes above the tilde, making it look like a face. Possibly a triffid’s face, if such a thing existed. But more of that anon.

One of the neat things about Inkscape is that you can edit Scaleable Vector Graphics (SVG) files, which most graphical web browsers know how to display. Or to put it another way, if you are looking at an SVG on a web page, there’s a good change you can download it and then hack away at it with Inkscape. Copyright ogres permitting, of course. Completely coincidentally, here are some SVG files:

Downloadable and hence editable SVG versions of the four posters above.

The title of this post is One Of Our Spiders Is Missing, but this is just a bit of silly wordplay to encourage you to read the post all the way to the end. And to be fair EMF is generally very well provisioned on the spider front. You could lose a few spiders and there would still be thousands more…

What actually went missing was the Neurotypical Zone sign, as shown below. This was meant to be a light hearted riff on neurodiversity, but with hindsight I can see that it might have been quite unwelcome and triggering for some people. Apologies if you saw the sign and felt that way about it - please know that this was not the intention.