GeekFest 2012 Pushes Collaboration Between Communities

GeekFest 2012 (GeekFestID 2012) have been held on Saturday and Sunday, March 31 – April 1, 2012. The event, organized by Fowab and KibarKreasi, was held at Sasana Ganesha (Sabuga) Bandung, inviting more than 20 participants from various communities.

GeekFest itself, inspired by SXSW, as mentioned in the press release some time ago, is intended to collaborate variety of existing communities such as music, video, multimedia, information technology and gaming communities. The event was devided to several programs, such as main program, mini stage and exhibition from several communities. Aside from the already mentioned above, there are also comic, art graffiti and other communities.

Although not every community gave the work of collaboration, the highlight of the main event is about collaboration. In addition to collaboration in the form of work, collaboration also comes with a gathering of several communities in one event.

The presented work of collaboration, in example, is from Movieholic which collaborated in making movie based on photos collected by photo community, iPhonesia. Collaboration also presented from Riset Indie with its product animatronic collaborated with performance of Bottlesmoker plus live drawing as their background as they performed to entertain the audience. Of film and music genre, also presented collaboration such as Kepompong Gendut that in the process of preparing to launch its first film Demi Ucok (which is now in the process of crowfunding to raise funds to distribute the film at local cinemas) in collaboration with Homogenic who makes the video clips. Both appeared at the main program of GeekFest 2012.

Then, there was another collaboration of Petshopbox Studio – that also made GeekFest’s mascot, and Fowab in creating Twitter Runner game, game asset – characters made by Petshopbox, while the game itself was developed by Yohan from Fowab (back end) and Ibnu Triyono (front end). This game uses the hashtag tweeted by the audience where most tweeted hashtag will be the winner. Athlete character appears on the screen and moves like in a running race. GeekFest 2012 opening ceremony also featured collaboration between Saung Angklung Ujo with participants who tried to play Angklung on iAngklung application on iPhone.

I, who happened to be part of the committee (see disclosure below), is hoping that the collaboration would  not stop after the event. When several communities present in one event, collaboration is expected to occur. At least communities meet each other, like a game studio with musician, which later may be able to collaborate in creating music for a game from certain band, or for example, Jogja Force, which was also presented and demonstrated its art process, may collaborate with other communities, such as video or multimedia communities.

Event on the main stage was not merely performances but also performers telling the stories of their creative process. This is also a focus of GeekFest, where in addition to the performance, the people behind the performance were also asked to come on stage and shared the process in creating the performance. Like OpenLabs that after the show, talked about the community or the people behind Demi Ucok film who revealed the process of crowfunding or Joko Anwar who talked about behind the scene of Modus Anomali film and other sharing session.

Aside of that, introduction to people behind the creative process could also be found in the exhibition area where in addition to showing off the work, audience could directly experience the work and got to be up close and personal with the people behind it, like at the game community booth or Ableton Live electronic music booth.

On the mini stage, Agate Simfonia or Agate Akustik, which is a ‘band’ who creates music for Agate’s game, performed a couple of songs including the music from Titok game by Agate Studio. In addition to the mini stage area, a couple of performers were also representing communities – aside from the mentioned above: LifePatch, StandUp Comedy, HitmanSystem and other communities.

I personally were taking care of gaming community booth. Although it could only accomodate a few game studio (several game studios represented GameDevID namely NightSpade, TinkerGames, Studio Independent as well as Digital Happines, friends from Gamelan that even though present but couldn’t exhibit their game because of force majeur, Jotter Production and Altermyth), I hope that the event could provide space for them to introduce their games and the gaming communities to the visitors as well as giving space of collaboration with other communities. A game studio – TinkerGames used this event as a way to gain feedback for the game it was developing. Another game studio – Jotter and Altermyth showed their ability by doing live drawing and holding a Fan Art Speed Painting competition.

Some communities – other booth participants like JogjaForce, Twittalk or MalesBanget.com tried to entertain the audience with various activities like Twittalk with its live interview via Twitter and Malesbanget.com with its hilarity.

GeekFest was held for the first time and is far from perfect. There are still many shortcomings and still needs improvement for the next events. But when I chatted with several parties who are competent in their field (often hold or participate in an event), the concept and idea is pretty interesting, the execution must be corrected. Certainly we can expect improvement for this event that is scheduled to be held annually.

Disclosure: DailySocial is a media partner of GeekFest 2012. I am active in Fowab and is in the committee of GeekFest2012.