The main engineering show of the country, Interpipe TechFest, has been held in Dnipro for four years in a row.
Last year I didn’t get to go to this event, and I decided to catch up on this one.
Interpipe TechFest is the largest technical and popular science festival in Eastern Europe and the country’s main engineering show. The festival has been held since 2016. In simple words, this is an exhibition of modern engineering and technology, lectures in the format “just about the complex”, competitions in technical disciplines, and wow-activity.
Just a few numbers. More than 220 participants in technical competitions, 36 lecturers, about 30 robots, and all this in one location! Also this year, the festival has a record of 20,000 visitors (for comparison, last year there were 17,000). Holding Interpipe TechFest in Dnipro is no coincidence because it is one of the most industrial, engineering, and educational centers in Ukraine.
The festival itself lasted two days, in the amusement park “Avalanche”. The scale was really impressive – here you have a dancing robot that showers you with compliments: “Hi, beauty”, and engineering startups, spectacular experiments in the field of physics, transformers, and exploding barrels in the truest sense of the word. There was also the opportunity to take part in technical master classes, communicate with scientists, and personally test new technologies.
It is worth talking about the headliners of the festivals separately because they made a huge impression on me. The festival was opened by a unique group Compressorhead – a musical and technological project of German Frank Barnes and designers Markus Kolb and Stock Plam. The band officially announced itself in 2013 – the performers are created from scrap metal, and most of the movements are performed using electro-pneumatics and a special interface that turns Midi signals into movements. A mix of art and technology in the truest sense of the word.
It is worth talking about the headliners of the festivals separately because they made a huge impression on me. The festival was opened by a unique group Compressorhead – a musical and technological project of German Frank Barnes and designers Markus Kolb and Stock Plam. The band officially announced itself in 2013 – the performers are created from scrap metal, and most of the movements are performed using electro-pneumatics and a special interface that turns Midi signals into movements. A mix of art and technology in the truest sense of the word.
Also this year, Interpipe TechFest has become the main platform for discussing the future of Ukrainian technical education, as well as future technologies. I would like to note that the special speaker of the festival was the Minister of Science and Education of Ukraine Anna Novosad. The lecture by Inigo Muñoz, an analog astronaut of the Austrian Space Forum (OeWF), astrophysicist, and aerospace engineer, who is involved in the research and testing of new technologies that will allow people to colonize Mars, turned out to be very interesting.
It was also interesting for me to communicate with colleagues from other publications who, for example, know everything about railways and mechanical engineering, stream and take part in Dota 2 competitions. At the festival, I quite by chance met my first leader, Irina Yevtushenko. We took pictures with transformers, danced with robots to MONATIK and bought half of the books. With Lena Los from the newspaper “Magistral”, we regularly attended lectures and with no less regularity made ourselves “coffee breaks” and dined together.
But with Dmitry Bunetsky from delo.ua, we not only walked up and down the entire TechFest location several times but also sniffed… oil. Now I know exactly what money smells like 🙂
