Who doesn't love a music festival? Round about now we'd have had tickets in hand, tent packed and be counting the days to Roskilde, WOMAD, Pohoda, Ostrava... so many festivals worldwide, that have been cancelled in real life for 2020 and who knows for 2021, and facing challenges keeping audiences entertained in a virtual world. Sadly huge numbers of people in the music and festival industry have now lost their jobs as well. 

CERN's Festival Programme began in 2016, taking physics to the WOMAD festival in the UK in the form of a Physics Pavilion. Since then the programme has expanded to four European festivals annually, reaching 20,000 people in the 2019 season alone. Equally CERN welcomes several high profile musicians each year as Special Guest Visitors, sharing their experiences with millions of fans through social media. 

How can we bring the Music Festival experience online in such a way that it is NOT just a series of pre-recorded videos, reached through a nicely presented website? How can we attempt to recreate the excitement of that interaction - whether it's that awesome feeling of seeing particle tracks while making a Cloud Chamber in a Science Pavilion workshop or the adrenaline-surging moment of singing your favourite song along with thousands of others live with the musicians?

This is additionally an opportunity to engage and improve the experience for physically impaired festival fans for whom, I know well, the 'field' experience can be challenging at best, impossible to overcome at worst. They should NOT feel sidelined. Together we can create an experience that is incredible for all.