Bent Festival 2011's photostream

The Bent Festival is an annual art and music festival celebrating circuit bending and its related creative practices: DIY electronics, hardware hacking, glitch, software art, abstract video. Each year artists are welcomed from across the country and around the globe to share their craft through performances, workshops, video screenings, art exhibitions, and installations. The festival, as a whole, showcases the state of the art in DIY electronics and circuit bending culture.

Circuit bending refers to the act of the creative short circuit, a process that began through modifying the circuitry of battery-powered children’s toys to create strange, outlandish, unintended, and unpredictable sounds. This re-appropriation of objects of a digital youth has grown in popularity as it offers an affordable, culturally accessible path into the creation of electronic music and sound art. Performers wrangle squelches, bleeps, groans, and blips out of everyday childhood toys in addition to producing fragmented and abstract images from video games systems, digital cameras, and by directly hacking computer files. This is fun to watch, and fun to do.

Circuit bending is the direct result of experimentation, exploration, and play. Almost no technical know-how is needed to get started, making circuit bending accessible to a wide audience who may be curious about electronic art, but feel intimidated by the steep learning curve or passivity of the traditional performance setup.