From: http://minitekfestival.com/blog/

dear all,

as we’ve expected, there are many enraged, disappointed and upset people out there that gave minitek’s first edition their support.

obviously we want to apologize for all the mishaps that have taken place over the weekend and we know well that we can offer little to make up for the bad experiences. we can’t blame you for directing all your anger towards us, as we are the official representatives of the festival, however, to save at least a little bit of face, we would like to set a few things clear.

1) unlike the comments that have been posted, we DID NOT book a night venue that wouldn’t hold the amount of people we expected. instead we worked with a venue that had misrepresented their certificate of occupancy (the official document that restricts the amount of people the venue can legally hold). there was no reason to believe that the 38.000sf venue couldn’t hold the people that had paid for weekend passes at the very least.

2) when we moved to rebel that same night, they had clear instructions to let in everyone with a wristband for free. most people i spoke to didn’t have an issue, but we did read in some posts that people had to pay again, which we deeply regret. at least we were able to salvage paul ritch’s, paco osuna’s, elon’s, memek’s and marco carola’s set, and we hope that we receive at least a little bit of credit for having been able to move to a backup venue within 10 minutes of the news that we were going to get shut down at 3:30am, most festivals would have just ended there.

3) minitek night was supposed to take place at the penn plaza both nights. the police had notified us that they would accept a maximum of 75 people in the space the second night, so we were obviously forced to work on a contingency plan. as you can imagine, there are hardly any venues in new york city that are large enough to hold several thousand people and second, available on a saturday night. we had to resort to splitting the night into two in order to make sure we could hold as many people as possible and honour the performances of the artists.

4) regarding the opening of the second stage on saturday in coney island, it was a delay on the side of the sound production company, and as much as we pressured them, they weren’t able to open the stage until 7pm. however, we do take the blame nonetheless.

5) the RFID wristbands didn’t work out because they required internet access in order to be charged and loaded. we had ordered (and paid) internet connection at the penn plaza over 4 weeks ago and for the system to work, we would have needed 28 separate IP addresses, one for each reader. we eventually received only 5 IP addresses (without prior notice), and throughout the night, the internet dropped entirely, rendering the whole system useless. we will reimburse money loaded onto the wristbands at the beginning of the night, please get in touch with us on info@minitekfestival.com and keep the wristbands.

as for the organisation on our end, we admit that there were countless mistakes and misjudgements made. had it been only for those though, we would have still been able to pull off the event without major glitches, albeit not as planned but certainly far from the disasters that eventually happened. we take the blame for those but we do hope that you understand that most chaos was caused by the night venue’s misrepresentation, which – straightout- f***ed us over, collected ten thousands of dollars from us and left us stranded. the disappointment of the many people that couldn’t enter that night make us feel beyond miserable…

all in all, as much as many of you had a terrible experience, you can’t even possibly imagine how we feel about the festival. apart from all personal money invested and lost, we also dedicated months and months of our time and all our energy and passion to making something happen that new york had never seen before. we had a vision and seeing the aftermath of everything almost kills our spirit.

a million things went wrong this year but the turnout proves that at least the idea of minitek wasn’t totally crazy and unless we’re fully deluded we did see and spoke to thousands of happy faces over the weekend, dancing, enjoying the music and thanking us for making minitek happen in the first place. all sets were amazing, and rich’s and francois k’s closing sets surely were epic.  and while the angry festival-goers are voicing their opinions on blogs and message boards, most satisfied attendees are silent…

so, a big apology  to all of you who felt mistreated this weekend, we certainly had no intentions of delivering less than we promised. and a big “thank you” to those who still support us and who believe that with great lessons learned, we’ll be able to give new york the festival it deserves next year! and after all: at least we had the guts to do it. as far as we know, no one else pulled off an electronic music festival in NYC till now, and even though it was a disaster at times and we feel miserable right now, watching the videos of minitek on youtube does give us goosebumps and the energy to do it all over again next year. more organised, better structured and exactly the way it was planned. first times are never easy.

love,

jenny, daniele & the whole minitek team

please feel free to send us evil emails to info@minitekfestival.com and in case there are people out there who would like to drop us a line of support, please do so. in times like today, a few kind words surely go a long way…