MUTEK.SF Nexus Experience 2020
The 2019 Mutek.SF festival brought artists, designers and musicians together from around the world through a five day festival spanning six venues in San Francisco. The plan for 2020 was on the same path, however a global pandemic forced us all into our homes and created a barrier to gathering with our familiar communities. Community is at the heart of Mutek, and while we couldn’t all gather in person the team was inspired and determined to bring everyone together in a virtual venue. Enter the Nexus Experience.
5 rooms of simultaneous content
16 hours of curated programming over 2 days
16 hours of community programming (afterhours)
30 Musical Acts (Live A/V + DJ)
9 Interactive Art Pieces
28 Films/Animations/Shorts
6 Lectures/Workshops
7,000 unique attendees
3,500 at peak concurrent use
18 person staff working from a dozen locations around the world
MUTEK.SF partnered with Currents.FM, who was in the process of building their virtual venue. Fresh AV brought technical direction and streaming capabilities to the mix, working with musical acts and digital artists to present their content both live and prerecorded across multiple stages and from multiple streaming locations around the world. While we worked with teams across the globe live via Slack, an online comms system, texts and whatsapp, the audience connected through Currents.FM’s text and video chat features.
The best feedback we could have received was that the guests who felt community so lacking in their worlds during the pandemic could be found again with MUTEK on the Currents.FM platform.
“I’m sure you’re probably overloaded with communication right now but thank you from the bottom of my heart for this beautiful festival. I have never experienced an event like this online before. Gonna be processing this for a while but like... this feels like a real possibility for socially-distanced music community.”
— David
MUTEK.SF SECOND EDITION
Mutek.SF is a nonprofit organization dedicated to presenting innovative electronic music, sound art, collaborative audiovisual works, and digital art at large. John Mitchell, technical director and good friend of Fresh AV, approached us to help out with design, management and tech for this multi-venue, three day event.
Between the design of six stages, stage management of ten stages plus working with artists on their installations throughout each venue, assisting with crewing and building in six venues all over San Francisco over five days, including three full days and nights of show, not to mention assisting in the production management of the event as a whole, we were pretty tired when all was said and done.
This international community coming together to celebrate music and art from all over the globe is a project that we are very honored to have been a part of.
