What does a hack festival look like? On the 14th and 15th of June, Loop organised its Vent en Poop at the site of the Reuilly barracks in Paris. An official squat bringing together a group of DiY associative actors.
Hacking just a few steps away from the territorial army recruitment centre was daring. The organisers of these two open house days at the Reuilly barracks (partly closed down) have a truly good sense of humour: the second edition of their hack festival has an embellished title “Le Vent en Poop” (prime meaning scatological in English). Last 14th and 15th of June, they were celebrating multidisciplinary DiY in an ambient disorganisation they claim as a trademark. “ I must say I finished the programme last night, quite frankly do not remember it all, and it is likely to change substantially” says one of them with a smile. He however points out to visitors that an open price entrance fee does not necessarily mean free of charge.
The whole thing has taken the form of a pleasant mess scattered across the courtyard of the military building still waiting for rehabilitation (the army still occupies a very small part of the site). In the meantime it accommodates in bulk Emmaus, an emergency accommodation centre, le Jardin d’Alice (a collective of artists previously located in the 18th arrondissement of Paris), la Gare XP, la Blackboxe (hackerspace) and le Loop. In between demonstrations, activists, knitter hackers, electro luthiers and authors of not quite identified DiY objects would meet.
The members of Loop got their “data” assessment of this 2014 Poop:
2 days
50+ conferences/workshops/performances…
400+ people
320 bottles of Club Mate
300 litres of local homemade beer
∞ Datalove
Visitors are definitely not there by chance, like these stories posted on Twitter:
“I put two odd socks on this morning but it doesn’t matter because I must quickly set off for the #poop2014. Only killer conferences!”, says Herdir (@Herdir).
“Return of #poop2014. I ate vegan, cut strawberries, and had discussions with very interesting people”, says Alserweiss (@Alserweiss).
Please note the great success of the DiY book scanner presented by la Quadrature du Net that allows you to scan up to 700 pages per hour without torturing your book.
Demonstration of the book scanner at la Quadrature last October:
With two simultaneous conferences per hour, numerous more or less comprehensive workshops – brace yourself for the one on GO language, the new “Esperanto” of programming – and even a web radio, the more than dense programme of interventions was far from scatterbrained. The one on the free applied to the living from Valentin Lacambre – old timer of independent Web and co-founder of Gandi – tackles the food-processing cartels and the Nagoya protocol by putting forward the open source as a protector of the genetic heritage of seeds and the freedom of farmers. Plenty here to make you a little thirsty in order to go and sip some homemade beer at the hackers’ bar.