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FW:B/FEST/2026/SCHEDULE

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Sat, Aug 1

  • 11 AM–7 PMIdyllwild Shuttle PointGuest Check In
  • 11:30 AM–1:30 PMThe ParkHumans Make Music: Future of Collective CreationAmergemusic

    A hands-on and ears-on experiment in music collaboration between Amerge, The Park, and FWB Festies (you).

    Bio

    Amerge is the world's first artist-owned music licensing cooperative, unifying composition and master rights under member ownership so creators control their catalog and share directly in its revenue. We replace opaque middleman deals with transparent splits that send value straight back to the makers, placers, and operators. Demonstrating what human-centric, artist-owned music infrastructure can look like in the future. Co-owned by music supervisors, artists, and operators attending FWB Fest including: Levi Downey, Tzar, Solano, Sheila Saadieh, Dylan Kane-Ritsch, and special guests!

  • 12–6 PMLibrary (Patio)NOUN coffeeexperience
  • 12–12:30 PMAmphitheatrePSAGANmusic
  • 12–6 PMMusic NerdThe Sanctuary for Technological CreativesC.Y. Lee & Carl Tydingcoideas

    Come hang with technological creatives who've been building software & hardware as an extension of their work. Ask them to show you their work in process. Tell them what you've been vibe coding. Stop by anytime! There will be snacks. Artists include Sound of Fractures (Alone Together), Tom Vek (Sleevenote), Pete Rango (Music Nerd), Songadaymann (We All Make a Platformer), Vivid Fever Dreams (Dream Sequence), Xcelencia (El Nino Maravilla), TK (Darkside), Black Dave, Mary Maguire, and you!

    Bio

    C.Y. Lee and Carl Tydingco are creative technologists who believe in worlds where fans support independent artists directly.

    They've been conspiring with 30 artists to will these ecosystems into existence based on wisdom from the patronage, record store, file sharing, streaming, and NFT eras.

    They've gone to every FWB FEST and want to meet you.

  • 12:30–2:30 PMKennedy KilnSOUND FOUNDRY: Sand-Casting a Lo-Fi Sound RecorderNOWAREideas

    A hands-on hardware workshop centered on sand-casting and building a custom lo-fi sound recorder.

    Bio

    Noware is a Brooklyn-based studio founded by Harry Isaac and Sebastian Bidegain, building fashion tech for people who want expressive and playful gadgets. The two met online in 2024 while sharing their hardware experiments, from cameras built into rocks to speakers you can wear, and turned that shared instinct into a brand. Their first product, PUFF, is a flash drive you wear as jewelry that comes alive with animations as you use it. Noware is on a mission to make the tech we use every day more fun, playful, and personal.

  • 12:30–1:30 PMIAH (Lab)Tasteslop: Mapping Cultural ChangeEmily Segalideas

    Every major technological shift creates new forms of culture and new forms of anxiety. As media environments change, our tastes, identities, brands, aesthetics, and social behaviors reorganize in response. In this hands-on workshop, we'll explore how technological change becomes visible through culture. Drawing on Nemesis's concept of Tasteslop, Marshall McLuhan's Tetrad, K-HOLE's theories of Brand Anxiety Matrix, and others, we'll develop practical tools for analyzing the emotional and cultural effects of emerging technologies. Through collaborative exercises, participants will learn how to use McLuhan’s Tetrad framework to trace the simultaneous effects of media on culture, identify recurring patterns of technological anxiety, and build their own experimental frameworks for cultural analysis and trend forecasting. Participants will leave with a new vocabulary for understanding how ideas spread, how media reshape culture, and how today's technological shifts become tomorrow's cultural common sense.

    Bio

    Emily Segal is a cultural forecaster, strategist, and writer. She founded Nemesis Global, K-HOLE, and Deluge Books and is the author of the novel Mercury Retrograde.

  • 12:30–1 PMAmphitheatreHighland Park Sleep Collectivemusic
  • 12:30–1 PMStudio DThe Rise of Eastern TechnologiesWeiwei Hsuideas

    For decades, the story of technology has been told through a Western lens, but beneath the surface, a different paradigm has been forming across the Pacific. From Genshin Impact rewriting the economics of gaming to TikTok reshaping how a billion people discover information, from K-pop's industrialized creativity to Shenzhen shipping hardware at a speed the West can't match — Eastern technology isn't catching up. It's operating from an entirely different playbook. This talk explores how the East approaches technology. What happens when technology is built on top of collectivist culture instead of individualist culture? When speed-to-market matters more than IP protection? When creativity is treated as an industrial process rather than an act of individual genius? We'll look at how our side of the Pacific thinks about creativity, authorship, distribution, and lifestyle — and what it means for everyone building technology today.

    Bio

    Weiwei Hsu mixes toys, computing, architecture, and community building to design new interactions, both on screen and off. She is the founder of Sprout, which builds products like I-Ching Divination and AI Meridian app to push eastern practices and philosophies forward. Before this, she was the youngest staff to join YC Research, designing an AR operating system under the leadership of Bret Victor.

  • 1–6 PMGalleryFriends of Friends Marketexperience

    A thoughtfully curated market of emerging creative practices across fashion, objects, print, and food — featuring Leeann Huang clothing, Tenpopo floral objects and tea, Bailey Hikawa phone accessories, Comfort Magazine independent print, Meals Clothing, Danbi, and Forest Floor.

  • 1–1:40 PMSageThe Art and Science of Pursuing Creative ProjectsPedram Pejmanideas

    In this interactive session, we’ll have a conversation on creation in the context of music, content, art and technology. We’ll touch on some of the philosophy he’s arrived at but will mostly focus on practical questions like: • What should technologists, content creators, artists and entrepreneurs learn from one another? • What is the lifecycle of a creative or research project? • How do you decide which creative ideas to pursue and how much to invest in them? • How do you keep your authentic, artistic voice when scaling to new markets, media and formats? Bring questions as this will be a heavily Q&A driven session.

    Bio

    Pedram works on ML research at Google Deepmind and is 1/2 of the jazz-electronic duo, STELLA.

  • 1–1:30 PMLibraryFuture Artefacts 2026Ben Dittoideas

    A discussion on the role of physical media, tactility, archives and luxury. In 2016 we founded a company, Future Artefacts, centred on the future of the object. Since then, technology has progressed more than anyone could have imagined, but physical media still has a role. Ben Ditto will talk about lessons learned from decades producing media and we will discuss what we should do about it in the future, or what might be done that is beyond our control.

  • 1–6 PMSunsetA HUNDRED THOUGHTSU.N.N.A.M.E.D.experience

    A Hundred Thoughts is an audio-visual installation, an interior monologue turned inside out. The private questions a person carries into a gathering, projected into the open. It speaks in the language of machines because that is the language we think in now, and it borrows those words back from the platforms to return them to their older meanings, the ones about people. The piece was made for FW:B FEST in Idyllwild, a mile up in the San Jacinto mountains, where the coverage drops and something older comes back into range: the unhurried thought, the unrecorded night. FW:B runs on that energy, generosity as infrastructure, joy as a regenerative resource, and this work is simply that belief given a screen (and life). There are ninety-nine thoughts in the transmission. The hundredth is yours..

    Bio

    Manuel Dilone is co-founder of U.N.N.A.M.E.D., a design-led brand and venture studio with offices in New York, Stockholm, and Los Angeles. Through the studio, he partners with iconic brands including Apple, Nike, Netflix, New Balance, OURA, and Rivian. On the venture side, the studio works alongside ambitious founders, helping them realize entire brand identities and product experiences.

    Before U.N.N.A.M.E.D., Dilone spent two decades building brands and companies, from creative direction at R/GA for Nike, Tiffany & Co., and Google, to collaborations with the Guggenheim Museum, to leading transformational work for Tom Ford, Airbnb, and Instagram as principal of Character's New York studio. His work has earned industry honors, and he mentors and teaches design through SVA, Pratt, and the New Museum.

  • 1–6 PMLibraryInplorationexperience

    Inploration—an art initiative exploring the wonder of space to deepen our connection to the world we inhabit—arrives at FWB Festival as a live, participatory cosmic experience. Through a guided creative activity, audiences are invited to reflect, respond, and engage with the sky as a shared space of imagination, perspective, and possibility. The Inploration LP record, featuring Toro y Moi, available for purchase.

    Bio

    Richelle Ellis is an expeditionary artist, curator, and analog astronaut. Her art and research aims to use space to help life on Earth, to see the world – and ourselves – in new ways. Richelle creates artworks made for international orbit, etched on satellites, suspended by Stratollite balloons and aboard rockets. Her work spans exhibitions from the Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo to the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum, with recent artworks on the surface of the Moon.

    She is Co-Founder of Inploration and co-author of Inploration: Art Exploring Space to Understand Earth, published by DelMonico Books, as well as the Founding Director of Supercollider, a Los Angeles platform advancing art, science, and technology.

  • 1–6 PMPoolPool Party with Crusherz Popz 🍉🧊experience
  • 1:15–1:45 PMAmphitheatreBeing Theremusic
  • 1:15–1:45 PMStudio DMeet Mayor Max, IIIideas

    Shake paws.

    Bio

    Maximus Mighty-Dog Mueller III (born 5 September 2022) serves as the third mayor of Idyllwild, part of the census-designated place of Idyllwild–Pine Cove, California. He took office on 10 December 2022, succeeding his predecessor and cousin Mayor Max II.

  • 1:45–2:15 PMLibraryLessons from the Brainless WorldClaire L. Evansideas

    Neural networks form the basis of both our sense of cognitive uniqueness and the foundation of the AI models transforming our culture. But contemporary biology research increasingly shows that non-neural living systems—from bacteria and unicellular creatures to slime molds, plants, and ant colonies—can process information, store memories, and adapt to changing world. Could such systems help us to overcome our cognitive anthropocentrism and inspire more resilient AI models? Science journalist and artist Claire L. Evans makes contact with ancient forms of intelligence on her journey into the weird, wet, surprisingly verdant future of computing.

    Bio

    Claire L. Evans is a writer and musician exploring technology, biology, and media. She is the singer of the Grammy-nominated pop group YACHT, writer/co-producer of the experimental video game Blippo+, co-founder of VICE’s speculative-fiction imprint Terraform, and author of Broad Band, a history of women in computing.

  • 2–5 PMIAH (Patio)Club Chessexperience

    • A. L. BAHTA

    • CORRINE CIANI

    Club Chess is a chess-adjacent lifestyle brand founded in 2023 by A. L. Bahta and Corrine Ciani in New York City. Having built a name throwing events that meld chess, nightlife, and niche cultural references, Club Chess has been mentioned in The New York Times, The New York Post, and New York Magazine. As a boutique brand creative agency, Club Chess has partnered with Maison Margiela, Precious Renee Tucker, The Standard, Selfridges, The North Face, and Grailed.

  • 2–3:30 PMSound StageAscension Servicemusic
  • 2–3 PMAmphitheatreTelemakusmusic
  • 2–3 PMThe ParkMusical Self Expression Spectrum with Máuhanideas

    Musicking with Máuhan is an exploration of "Music as a verb". Máuhan believes music is something you do, it's active rather than passive. This activation and talk will explore the various ways we self express with music, repositioning music consumption as something far beyond hitting play. With passive streaming and ai written songs, Máuhan encourages us to reflect on the parts of music that remind us we are human.

    Bio

    Máuhan M Zonoozy is a serial entrepreneur and conceptual artist, former Head of Innovation at Spotify, and the Founder and CEO of A Vinyl Bar in Shibuya. Zonoozy has been a music critic, BCG Partner, VC and angel investor, and 2x exited founder. He was featured by Rhizome for streaming Wu-Tang Clan’s $4 million album in a phone booth, he built and sold an app in a weekend last year, and he translates emerging music trends and internet culture at Dead.online.

  • 2–2:30 PMStudio DChance Encounters: Internet Art, Algorithms, and AuthenticityMaya Manideas

    The artist will perform live website readings of a collection of her generative, browser-based work. Each featured work involves an element of “chance” programmed into its custom software, so the text read will be determined in real time by the website’s code. The readings will be followed by an artist talk introducing her recent work that focuses on the performance of self and “authenticity” online. The presentation will take place entirely in an internet browser.

    Bio

    Maya Man is an artist focused on contemporary identity culture on the internet. Her work examines narratives around femininity, authenticity, and the performance of self online. She has exhibited at the Whitney Museum of American Art, bitforms, SOOT, Verse, HEK, and Feral File, and organizes the curatorial project HEART.

  • 2–4 PMGalleryEntrepreneurs' Tarot: Readings for FoundersGreg Bresnitzexperience

    Private card readings for founders, C-suite executives, and investors. Greg pulls from the 22 Major Arcana and reads them as a strategic mirror: pattern recognition for the decisions spreadsheets can't answer. Cofounder friction, the pivot question, the round you closed against your gut, the identity underneath the role. Three cards, fifteen minutes, and the conversation you've been having with yourself finally out loud.

    Bio

    Greg Bresnitz is the creator of Entrepreneurs' Tarot, a strategic mirror for founders. A multiple-time founder and former FWB CEO, he pulls cards for founders, C-suite executives, and investors, using the Major Arcana as a framework for the decisions data can't settle. His weekly readings publish every Tuesday at entrepreneurstarot.com.

  • 2–4 PMIAH (3D)Create interactive light sculptures with Moonstone Lampkelin.onlineideas

    A hands-on workshop where participants build glowing, stackable lamp sculptures. Start from pre-made enclosures that look like stones, screw in PCBs, then incorporate found objects and paper lantern techniques to create your own one-of-a-kind lit sculptures. No electronics experience required. Approximately two hours.

    Bio

    kelin.online is making her own post-AGI job. She pivoted from a decade of designing software to now making hardware, focusing on tech toys for all ages: cameras that write poetry, cairns that glow as lamps, familiar objects quietly made strange. She has taught at RISD and SVA.

  • 2:30–3 PMLibraryRecognition MachinesBanu Gulerideas
    • BANU GULER

    Bio

    Banu Guler leads product, design, and frontend at Midjourney, following its acquisition of Co-Star, the astrology app she founded, organically downloaded over a third of young women in the US. She is a Scorpio.

  • 2:30–4 PMSageLet Other People Sharpen Who You Want to BeCeline Nguyenideas

    A collaborative workshop where we’ll draft and shape our personal mission statements. These statements can be about your artistic practice, your technological ambitions, or other long-term projects. Mission statements make our ambitions legible to ourselves and to the external world. But writing one can feel lonely and uncertain, like fumbling through the dark recesses of our psyches. The right interlocutors can help us fumble through a little faster. This workshop will borrow exuberantly from ideas in the Chinese philosophical classic Zhuangzi, the contemporary philosopher C. Thi Nguyen’s work, and a constellation of other reference points. Defining your life’s work doesn’t have to be daunting—it can be a playful, iterative struggle that we share with each other. This workshop is presented in partnership with Notion— the place where people and agents think together on your life’s work.

    Bio

    Celine Nguyen is a software designer and critic. Her newsletter, personal canon, is about literature, design, technology, and creativity.

  • 2:45–3:15 PMStudio DHow I Lost 500lbs & other shit I did with Creative TechnologyTina Tarighianideas

    This talk follows artist and creative technologist Tina Tarighian through a series of increasingly questionable *new* projects that use humor, spectacle, and emerging technology to ask serious questions about the digital world.

    Bio

    Tina Tarighian is an artist whose practice moves between demo and spectacle, repurposing the formats of contemporary technology to examine what they do and what they reveal.

  • 3–6 PMGalleryCrazy Hair DayGrownkidexperience

    Remember crazy hair day back in middle school? Whether you were rocking a mohawk in 3rd grade, liberty spikes while ditching class in high school, or dyeing it a random pattern in your first apartment - Grownkid is here to remind you that you've still got it. We'll be giving out mohawks, liberty spikes, and other unhinged styles at FWB Fest. Let us turn you back into a grownkid.

    Bio

    Grownkid is a social club for playful people, hosting weekly play-based events across NYC on a mission to make young adulthood more connected through community and play. With over 15 million views across events like Wrestling Speed Dating, Gym Bros Benching Twinks n Dolls, and Fight Your Evil Situationship Boxing Rave, Grownkid has been featured in the New York Times, Dazed, and New York Magazine.

    Founded by Gael Aitor and Kayla Suarez, creators of Teenager Therapy - the world's largest youth mental health podcast (1M+ followers; featured in Time, Variety, Teen Vogue, and the NYT, with guests ranging from Prince Harry and Meghan to Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy).

  • 3–4 PMIAH (Lab)Game OnFuserideas

    Game-Making Workshop + Champagne Hang out with us for an hour and create your own interactive game using creative coding and generative AI, all on the same canvas. No coding experience required 😘

  • 3:15–3:45 PMLibraryThe Content Codes (the playbook for modern social media at scale)Oren Johnideas

    Oren maps out the complete structure of algorithmic new media, then gives the exact processes and tools to go from finding success planting ideas online to scaling social media attention for brands, agencies and media companies.

    Bio

    Oren John is a former Creative Director and consumer-brand marketing leader who became one of the largest marketing and branding creators online, with more than one million followers. His career includes Red Bull, Lift Foils, Morphe, and Gel Blaster; as a creator he has produced work for Amazon, Cash App, Google, Notion, and Anthropic.

  • 3:30–5 PMAmphitheatreNate Mercereau & Carlos Nińo w/ Aaron Shawmusic
  • 3:30–4 PMStudio DEvery Era Has Its Bloodsport, aka How to Mobilize Sci-Fi for Company BuildingBen Ditto + Restless Eggideas

    • BEN DITTO

    • RESTLESS EGG

    Every era has its own bloodsport: gladiators, boxing, MMA. Ours just doesn’t bleed. This talk traces how speculative fiction can be mobilized to create venture-backed futures, using Robot Dog Fights as a case study. The presenters will explore how an initially provocative science-fictional premise became a real company, live entertainment format and emerging sport. They will also introduce Restless Egg’s accelerator model: backing cultural first movers with capital, infrastructure and company-building support to transform experimental ideas into scalable products, companies and entirely new categories.

    Bio

    William Morgan and Sam Lipnick are co-founders of Restless Egg, an accelerator backing cultural first movers to turn experimental practices into category-defining technology companies.

    Ben Ditto — Global Editorial Director of VICE Magazine — and Siâna-Leànn Douglas are co-founders of Yaya Labs, the studio behind Robot Dog Fights: a new competitive entertainment format combining robotics, sport, spectacle and world-building.

  • 4–4:30 PMLibraryIt's all neck down, baby! A sublime field report from the age of abundant intelligenceSari Azoutideas

    After a few years of using AI, I find it both brilliant and unsatisfying. This talk is my attempt to understand why. It starts in the most practical places—with real examples from my own work—and ends somewhere more mystical, drawing on consciousness research, neuroscience, and religious texts to make the case that AI represents the collapse of the logic system, not the end of intelligence.

    Bio

    Sari Azout is the founder of sublime.app, a second brain with a soul, an inspiration management tool for creatives, and writer of The Sublime, a newsletter exploring the parts of creativity and taste that AI can’t replace. Early to Substack, she has built a readership of more than 90,000 builders, designers, writers, and cultural operators thinking critically about how AI is reshaping their work. Her work advocates for technology in service of human flourishing rather than optimization alone.

  • 4–5 PMSound Stageangels, demons, & technology[REDACTED] EMOTIONSexperience

    American Independent Motion Picture Company [REDACTED] EMOTIONS is proud to present Films About Angels, Demons, and Technology: a short film program featuring new and top secret video work by Jon Rafman, Petra Cortright, Alec Moeller, Neal Wynne, Victoria Vincent, Bobby McCoy, and Nate Varrone. It’s a new dawn in American cinema.

    Bio

    Bobby McCoy runs [REDACTED] EMOTIONS, an American independent motion picture company and post-internet screening entity that has presented work by Jon Rafman, Kristoffer Borgli, Janicza Bravo, Eugene Kotlyarenko, and Harrison Fishman. It produces short-form films, is fundraising for its first feature, and builds IRL communities around internet-conscious cinema.

  • 4:15–4:45 PMStudio DArt in Space: Creativity Without LimitsRichelle Ellisideas

    In Art in Space: Creativity Without Limits, expeditionary artist Richelle Ellis shares her journey creating artworks for extreme and off-world environments—from analog Mars missions and stratospheric flights to artworks launched into orbit and placed on the Moon. Through stories of art, science, and exploration, Ellis invites audiences to imagine creativity as a force that expands perspective, deepens our connection to Earth, and opens new possibilities for the future. She will present an outdoor sculpture at the festival, inviting audiences to engage with Earth and space through new forms of wonder, connection, and perspective.

    Bio

    Richelle Ellis is an expeditionary artist, curator, and analog astronaut. Her art and research aims to use space to help life on Earth, to see the world – and ourselves – in new ways. Richelle creates artworks made for international orbit, etched on satellites, suspended by Stratollite balloons and aboard rockets. Her work spans exhibitions from the Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo to the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum, with recent artworks on the surface of the Moon.

    As Head of Creative Research for analog space missions via Hawaii Space Exploration Analog and Simulation (HI-SEAS), Sensoria Program, Lunares Research Station, and Astroland Interplanetary Agency, Ellis examines creativity beyond our world. Richelle’s artistic ventures have taken her to glaciers near the North Pole to parabolic flights in zero gravity, into the Biosphere 2 and Analog Mars Missions with NASA Goddard, earning her accolades and residencies at renowned institutions such as Planet, Google Quantum AI, SETI Institute, Schmidt Ocean Institute, Relativity and the Karman Project.

    She is Co-Founder of Inploration and co-author of Inploration: Art Exploring Space to Understand Earth, published by DelMonico Books, as well as the Founding Director of Supercollider, a Los Angeles platform advancing art, science, and technology.

  • 4:30–6 PMIAH (Lab)Playful PrototypingExplorers Clubideas

    Pencils in one hand, prompts in the other. The search for quality and quantity. A hands-on workshop on making things with AI and by hand. Inspired by the Pottery Parable: make one, make many in both digital and analogue, then discover what the process reveals.

    Bio

    Explorers Club is an independent global strategy and design studio founded by Aaron Skipper and Ayo Fagbemi, helping brands discover their secret genius. Guided by cultural curiosity and commercial conviction, the studio builds timeless and timely brands. With a portfolio spanning culture-shaping brands like Coca-Cola and Universal Music Group’s Real Thing Records, Nike, Atlantic Records, Dr. Martens and more, Explorers Club leverages strategic rigor, cultural insight and imaginative design to define what makes brands truly distinct.

  • 4:45–5:15 PMLibraryPerpetual PlaySpencer Changideas

    What are computers for? Our technology is more powerful than it’s ever been, yet people have never been more scared of what it’s for. I think technology is meaningless without the people it involves. Rather than better machines, we need more players imagining what technology can be. What does a future of millions of new interfaces, devices, and internets look like — and how do we build the foundation that makes it possible?

    Bio

    Spencer Chang is an artist, engineer, and toy maker interested in the play, creation, and care that emerge from our relationships with and through technological systems.

  • 5–6 PMThe ParkAcoustic Sets with Josh Lippi, Trevor Banta, Kyle, Chloe & Jonathan (Song A Day) Mannmusic
  • 6–7 PMAmphitheatreSTELLAmusic
  • 6:30–7:30 PMThe ParkFEST Beat Tape Open Studiomusic
  • 7–7:45 PMSunsetSonic Warfaremusic
  • 7:45–8:30 PMAmphitheatreNourished by Timemusic
  • 9–10 PMAmphitheatreToro y Moimusic
  • 10–10:30 PMFerroAfter Hours: Eli Gladmusic
  • 10:30–11:30 PMFerroAfter Hours: GRRLmusic
  • 11:30 PM–12:30 AMFerroAfter Hours: AceMomusic
  • 12:30–1:30 AMFerroAfter Hours: Baparimusic
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