Yeah, so yeah, so my name is Wille Hyvernen and I'm the chairman of the board of Pixel Lake
Festival. And the Pixel Lake Festival is basically, well it's difficult to call it even a festival,
but it's a series of happenings for people who do creative things using technology,
using internet, using media, activism, what not, but who don't usually fit in this normal
definition of artists or who don't like feel themselves or identify themselves as artists
or more like hobbyists or makers or hackers or activists or not. And in Finland and in
Scandinavia we felt when Pixel Lake started that there wasn't really a forum for these
kind of people. And of them there was projects what they did were left unfinished or unknown.
So we wanted to create this forum for this kind of marginal or cross-disciplinaries now
what people use this like word, but just things that happened in the borderline of things.
The focus is do it with others, because there's this do-it-yourself movement, do like DIY.
So we wanted to bring this idea of communal working, communal doing back to this scene.
Because the thing is that now when you can order everything from the internet you can
get all the recipes and instructions from the net or whatever, so these things are much
less shared like in real life so to say. Well, the big part of this do it with others
is also the big metal level is the festival itself, the Pixel Lake itself. Because the
Pixel Lake turned 10 and also the founding member Juha also decided to leave the organisation.
So it's actually and at the same time for the past couple of years Pixel Lake has established
itself that we have gotten into like regular funding from the Finnish government and the
city of Helsinki. So this is now this time for us to also think that what is it that
we want with Pixel Lake and the core group of people when we start to think about this
we thought that let's open up this process and then we try to invite the people who have
been regularly with Pixel Lake to join us of thinking that what would they want Pixel
Lake to be next 10 years or do they want to because we have this option we don't have
actually that many obligations we don't have any depth so we want to give this option
that we could decide that let's finish it you know because it's stupid that if some
organisation becomes a machine that should be running so the whole scene where we started
Pixel Lake has like changed a lot and developed a lot or evolved developed this wrong word
so and also the Pixel Lake has been able to kind of reinvent itself like quite regularly
and be reactive so this is now like what we want to do now when it's like been 10 years
to try to gather people together to decide together what do we want Pixel Lake to be
for the next 10 years so that's that's basically the one very big sub theme and that's why
we also keeping the festival actually this year is much much smaller than it has been
because of two reasons that we want to put more focus on like these monthly events that
are ongoing called Pixelversity to bring this kind of sustainability to it and the other
thing is that we want to have a bit more air and a bit more resources to think about what
we want to be in the future so you know this micro residency program that that we have
like one actually now remember that we decided that this four or five residencies per year
so that people come here for just two weeks to be a bit like reflect and understand to
work with us and to also to give this kind of a bit like outside review of the way we
work
