The Maker Faire is an event that occurs every six month and alternate between San Mateo and Austin, Texas. It is organized by the famous Make magazine http://makezine.com/ .

The goal of the event is to be a mix of Arts, Crafts, Engineering, Green Tech, Music, Science & Technology.

I was a lucky guy to be here for the Maker Faire in San Mateo, a city in the Silicon Valley between San Francisco & San Jose. The weather was perfect, sunny, perfect temperature.

There was enough stuff for all the tastes: robot fighters, races, flame throwers, coke mentos shows, weird vehicles, giant mousetraps, plush monsters, rockets, tanks, boats, potato launchers, electronic kits, musicians, clowns, geeks, freaks and engineers.

What is the limit between artists and makers ? very hard to say, what is true is that there was real artists exposing their creations: http://makerfaire.com/bayarea/2008/topics/index.csp?topic=16
I would say the real power of Maker Faire is to blur this limit, we don’t know who is who artist, geek, engineer? There is so much creations, people, noise, movement, around us that is impossible to know.

I really liked a music experiment composed of 8 different sound systems: each sound system was independent and dedicated to specific music parts: one for basses, one for riffs, one for drums, etc. There was one keyboard for each of them and open to the public. What was fun is traditionally when everybody plays music at the same time it is a big cacophony but here the “analog mixing” result was astonishing and really neat! Basically the guys succeeded in mixing the different ego-trips of the different players to one astonishing result!

I liked the electronic workshops. I also appreciated the huge number of scientific experiments (with explanation), making me forgetting the Palais de la Decouverte definitively.

Other links:

Giant mouse trap 2007 (I had no link for 2008): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t0wQq5_HDhk

The website: http://makerfaire.com/