Geek Picnic

The tradition & historical record

Geek Picnic is the largest European open air festival dedicated to popular science, modern technology, science and art. The first festival was held in St. Petersburg in 2011. Since 2014, Geek Picnic has been held in Moscow and St. Petersburg. In 2016, the first Geek Picnic was held in Israel. ¹

The first Geek Picnic took place, at the New Holland Island in Saint Petersburg, on August 6, 2011. It presented several scientific shows, including 3D printing and robotics, as well as indoor and outdoor activities like modern game consoles, monocycles, jumping stilts, gaming zone and sports ground. The festival attracted more than 1500 visitors. ¹

The second Geek Picnic was held at the same location on August, 3rd. It featured a wide variety of events including robot exhibition, a number of lectures in the format of TEDx and masterclasses by recognized experts from global (Gaidar Magdanurov from Microsoft, Yury Lifshits from Yahoo!), and Russian IT companies (Grachik Adzhamian, Alexey Voinov, Filipp Katz, Kirill Shichanov), a job fair for programmers and a dedicated Windarium Windows education site. The recreational zone offered open library, gaming space, sports and a picnic. Around 7000 people have visited the event. ¹

In 2013, Geek Picnic was a two-day festival held at Yelagin Island. The territory was divided into 4 zones dedicated to technology, science, art and picnic. The festival featured a display of most recent inventions in robotics and 3d printing, interactive science museum, meteorite exhibition and Fab lab. Event schedule included lectures by cosmonaut Alexander Volkov, historian Lev Lurie, a known polyglot, language teacher and television presenter Dmitry Petrov, engineer Anatoly Wasserman, and Nigel Ackland, known to be the world's first person to receive a bionic prosthetic arm, and numerous entrepreneurs, scientists and academics. The Russian quadcopter racing championship took place during the festival. Recreational areas included food court, playground and open-air exhibitions. Visitor count exceeded 15000 through 2 days. ¹

The winter session of 2014 Geek Picnic took place in VDNKh, Moscow, on January 25–26. Theme zones dedicated to technology, science and art, entertainment, lectorium and a playground for children were set up in a 15 thousand square meters pavilion. A number of speakers including Anatoly Wasserman and futurologist Dmitry Gluchovskiy gave lectures, and the founder of the Venus project Jacque Fresco held a skype conference call. The festival featured musical performance by Alexander Robotnick and the Desert Planet band. The displays included the world's biggest Tesla coil, 3D bioprinter prototype, quadcopter show, sculptures of Transformers characters and a robot show featuring Exoatlet hauler and InMoove android. The event had 30000 visitors. The summer Geek Picnic was held at Yelagin Island, Saint-Petersburg, in August. The event schedule included over 60 lectures and 30 masterclasses and workshops, drone and robot operation competitions, programming contest. Festival featured DIY-zones, robotics and 3D printing exhibition as well as 3D printed fashion show by Larisa Katz, Pia Hinze and Joshua Harker and had a total of 18000 visitors. ¹

That year, both Moscow and Saint Petersburg festivals took place in summer. The Geek Picnic in Moscow was held in Krasnaya Presnya park and featured 6 theme zones named 'Technology', 'Science', 'Art', 'Picnic', 'Expo' and 'Market'. A huge convention of people with bionic implants and prosthetics was the core event of the festival. Bebionic pioneer [Nigel Ackland], Actress [Angel Giuffria],'cyborg' activist Neil Harbisson, Jens Naumann whose vision is partially restored by brain implant, drummer Jason Barnes with robotic arm, Christian Ristow with large-scale robotic arm 'The Hand of Man,' and model and singer Viktoria Modesta, were among the participants. The musicians who played on the 3D-printed instruments also performed on the Picnic. 2015 Moscow Geek Picnic schedule also included music show performed on 3D printed instruments, fireworks, drone championship, lectures by Anatoly Wasserman, space test pilot Sergey Ryazansky and painter Boryana Rossa, and a communication session with Gennady Padalka and Mikhail Kornienko from aboard the ISS. The festival in Moscow had 22000 visitors. The Saint Petersburg 2015 Geek Picnic was held at Yelagin Island on June, 20th and 21st and had an event schedule similar to earlier Moscow festival. The visitors were greeted by Ristow's 6-ton robotic arm. The educational part of festival featured talks by the head of the Pushkin Museum Marina Loshak, artistic director of the Bolshoi Drama Theater Andrey Moguchy, musician Oleg Nesterov, ‘Mediaculture’ laboratory head Andrey Svibovich and other science and art workers joined by ‘cyborgs’ Nicolas Huchet and Viktoria Modesta. Pecha Kucha took place during the events. The festival had approximately 25000 visitors. ¹

The text above is adapted from the Wikipedia article “Geek Picnic”, available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 licence. ¹

Geek Picnic is science and technology festival, according to the structured record cited below. This entry was generated automatically from that record and has not yet been reviewed by a person familiar with the tradition. ²

The source record links this tradition to 6 external registers, which can be verified through the citation. ²