In 2018, Sherry Huss (sometimes called the mother of the maker movement) and artist and musician, Joe Szuecs, held an event, the Maker Music Festival, in Sebastopol, CA. The event was designed to celebrate makers who create their own instruments, sound artists, and other maker-minded musicians. The two had plans to make the event much bigger and our current pandemic situation has given them an opportunity to do just that.
The 2021 Maker Music Festival will be exclusively online and already the event is attracting participants from around the world. The virtual event will take place on May 15 and 16, 2021. See the event website for more info and to answer their initial Call for Makers.
Over the past year, Sherry and Joe have been involved with Decameron Row, an experimental virtual community housed in an imaginary building. This year's Maker Music Festival will take a similar approach.
The Maker Music Festival 2021 website will be a campus of imaginary buildings that house the work of makers from around the world. Participating makers will have a space in one of the eight buildings on campus, each named after a pioneer of music invention. The goal is to allow participants to explore, learn, meet, and enjoy the 100+ music makers in an experience similar to a real world 'open studios' tour. They can navigate from building to building and 'visit' the inhabitants therein. Each maker has provided a video, images, and text that describes themselves and their work, with links to their social media, additional videos and their website. And just like IRL, visitors can 'tip' a music maker via the maker's chosen payment method like Patreon or Buy Me A Coffee.
The campus of buildings metaphor has allowed collectives and other groups to 'own' their own buildings. Groups such as Hackoustic (London, England), MakeMe (Rennes, France), MakerNet (Shenzhen, China) and Center for New Music (San Francisco, CA) will occupy entire buildings and plans are being made for Makey Makey banana piano makers as well as others to be announced in the upcoming weeks. "We have an opportunity to create the largest gathering of music makers, and even better, we have created a place where their works can be archived and organized for others to enjoy," said Sherry "as we build a community that will continue to grow along with projects from makers from around the world." The website will serve as a hub for this community and there will be continuing live events and other activities.|
Visit the website to learn more or to get involved.
Image: Screengrab
