By Elmer Ploetz
Editor-in-Chief

The Buffalo Infringement Festival begins tomorrow night (July 25, 2024), and we’re excited.

Part of it is that we’re excited about the festival itself: over 150 shows in 32 venues over 11 days. That’s impressive. It will also be a lot of fun.

The festival is a wild assortment of every kind of art imaginable, from music to theater to visual arts to dance to mime to … well, just about anything. In some ways it seems to be the spiritual descendent of the early Artpark that we wrote about yesterday, only without the state budget.

It’s accessible, too, with many of the events being free or low-cost.

But we’re also excited to work with the Infringement Festival to give you a sense of what The Buffalo Hive can do. If you check our events schedule, you’ll find that every Infringement event is there. It’s true that Infringement does have a schedule on its own site, but we think it’s necessary to have the festival’s events integrated with all of the other great stuff going on around our region.

We’re looking forward to working with writer and mediamaker Miggie J., who will be providing lots of information about Infringement as it’s going on.

We’re really excited to have Ron Ehmke’s look back at the start of Infringement, headlined “Infringe This.”

I’ve participated in Infringement a few times myself. The festival has shown my documentaries and facilitated creation of “The Real Fake News.” During the 2017 festival, my daughter, Abby, and I did street interviews with people with the only caveat being that they had to answer the questions untruthfully. Later I edited the footage and we showed it during the 2019 fest.

Here’s the video.

Now get out there and get ready to infringe.