Can an old electronic toy make melodies? JACOB ADELMAN finds a festival full of rewired gadgets used as instruments.
Lorin Parker "plays" a plate of green Jell-O. (AP Photo/Jacob Adelman)
Festival participants attend a workshop on hacking portable CD players. (AP Photo/Jacob Adelman)
Hans Koch stood on stage with the disemboweled guts of a computer spread out on a table before him. He prodded the motherboard, floppy drive and modem with a pin and doused them with salt water. The components -- attached to a mixer and amplifier -- emitted bursts of noise that layered into a collage of static and feedback.
"I see it as a piece of experimental music," said Koch, a performer at the Bent Festival, which celebrates a genre of sound art called circuit bending. "You don't know what's going to happen and I don't know actually before doing it how the computer is going to sound."
Circuit benders like Koch take computers, electronic kids' toys, and other bits of circuit-studded flotsam, and rewire it to beep and squeal in ways their creators never intended.
The artistic genre got its start in the 1960s, when Cincinnati-based artist and musician Reed Ghazala, the so-called Father of Circuit Bending, accidentally shorted a toy transistor amplifier and began experimenting with the sounds it made, said sound artist Christiaan Cruz.
But circuit bending became a full-blown artistic movement -- albeit a niche one -- with the proliferation of kids' toys like Speak & Spell in the early 1980s that experimenters could open up and manipulate, he said.
"As soon as people found out how to hack that and make it do its crazy new voices and sounds and robot noises, it just excited everyone," Cruz said.
Lorin Parker, who "played" a blob of green Jell-O hooked up to a circuit board and amplifier at the festival, said circuit bending is about sonic exploration.
"I think the purpose is just, sort of, discovery," he said. "I feel sort of like Edison turning on his light bulb whenever I find something that works."
This is the first year that The Tank, Manhattan-based art center that organizes the Bent Festival, has taken it out of New York. Los Angeles was the first stop. Next come Minneapolis, April 19-21, and New York, April 26-28.
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Download the podcast here: http://asap.ap.org/data/interactives/_moneyandgadgets/podcasts/0418asap_bentbounced1.mp3
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Want more information? Check out:
The Bent Festival: http://www.bentfestival.org
The Tank: http://www.thetanknyc.org
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asap contributor Jacob Adelman is an AP reporter in Los Angeles.
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