Bent Fest: 2008 April 23, 2008

Bent Festival (National Tour)
Bent 2008: New York
April 24 to 26

The Bent Festival is an annual art and music festival celebrating DIY electronics, hardware hacking, and circuit bending. Each year we invite artists from across the country and around the globe to perform music with their home-made or circuit bent instruments, teach workshops to adults and children alike, create beautiful art installations and to generally come together, face to face, and showcase the state of the art in DIY electronics and circuit bending culture.

Thanks to Singha Beer there will be a nightly FREE BEER HAPPY HOUR HALF HOUR from 7pm-7:30pm during Bent Festival NYC. Come early and stay late!

Tickets:
Each concert is $10.
A Festival Pass to all events is available for $25.
(Buy tickets online: Smarttix)

Location:
DCTV
87 Lafayette St
New York, NY, 10013

Installations:
Installations are permanently on display during festival hours.
Michael Dory (NYC)
Lesley Flanigan (NYC) Andy Doro (NYC)
Phil Stearns (Los Angeles)
Ed Bear (NYC)
Lea Bertucci (NYC)
Leah Wechsler (NYC)
Dr. Bleep (Austin)
Steak (Austria)
Christopher McDonald (NYC)

Schedule:

Concert Series 1 - Thu, Apr 24, 6:00 PM (DCTV) - $10
6:00 Opening Reception
6:30 Dr. Bleep (Austin)
7:00 Furby Youth Choir (Austin)
7:45 Loud Objects (NYC) Torino:Margolis (NYC)
8:30 Steak (Austria)
9:15 Joo Youn Paek (Korea)
10:00 Phil Stearns (Los Angeles)

Concert Series 2 - Fri, Apr 25, 7:00 PM (DCTV) - $10
7:00 Aimee Norwich (NYC)
7:45 Computer at Sea (Maine)
8:30 EraSer (Italy)
9:15 Emilie Mouchous (Montreal) Erin Sexton (Montreal)
10:00 casperelectronics ()
10:45 Dr. Rek (Japan)
11:30 Roth Mobot (Distance Performance) (Chicago)

Workshops - Sat, Apr 26, 11:00 AM (DCTV) -
11:00 Intro Workshop with Clifford Bret (NYC)
Free with your own toy! Or keyboard toys available for $10 at the venue (while supplies last!)
In the Madnoodler's introduction to circuit bending course, participants will learn the basics of circuit bending. Organizational skills and soldering will be demonstrated. Other skills to be developed include pin pointing bends and taking an ordinary keyboard and making it into an opto theremin. Using variations of the "starmate" style keyboard, participants will be urged to explore with photo-resistors and alligator clips to find unique possibilities. After the fun of exploring these versatile keyboards, participants will stabilize and optimize their creation by heat shrinking the connections.

1:00 Sensors - op-amps, comparators, and digitally controlled switches with Phil Stearns (Los Angeles)
$20 Materials Fee - Buy Ticket Here
FOR EXPERIENCED ELECTRONIC TINKERERS an understanding of the electronics basics is a must though they will be rehashed briefly We will cover some basic types of analog sensors and look at how to interface them with circuit bending projects. The hands-on component will guide you through building a circuit that will allow sound and/or light to control bends.

1:00 Battery Powered Noise Generator with Jessica Rylan (Boston)
$10 Materials Fee - Buy Ticket Here
Maybe you're interested in EVP (electronic voice phenomena) and want a good source of white noise. Maybe you're a nervous wreck and need something to drown the world out. Or maybe you feel the need to dance in from of a giant amp that's blasting harsh noise every once in a while! If so, then this is the workshop for you. We'll build a simple noise generator using a handful of resistors, capacitors, and transistors. We'll also talk about the fundamentals of electric circuits, physical and mathematical approaches to noise, and historical perspectives on the electronics industry.

3:00 Hands-On Digital Sampler Design and Analysis for Circuitbending Applications Todd Bailey (Chicago)
Optional sampler kit available -- (Limited edition designed just for this class!) This class focuses on the fundamental architectures of the digital sampler -- how they work and what happens (technically) when you circuitbend them. I figured the best way to do this would be to design a sampler explicitly for this. In doing so I've tried to design a sampler which lends itself to circuitbending. As many of you know, older toys and instruments often lend themselves better to circuitbending than modern consumer products. The (one sentence) reason for this is the architecture of the circuits -- older chips couldn't do as much as new one can, so they needed more per toy, which essentially presents more "entry points" into the circuit. The sampler I've made (let's call her "Where's The Party At") explicitly brings as many functions out of the central microcontroller as possible -- clocks, addressing, data lines, and analog components are all exposed. This allows a couple things: 1.) It makes the function of the sampler more transparent, and easier for someone learning electronics to understand. 2.) It allows tinkering, as it exposes as many important circuit functions as possible. I'm going to spend the majority of the class talking about how audio gets from a microphone into a sampler and back out, referring to the Where's The Party At as a reference design. We'll look at the schematics, source code, printed circuit board layout, and examine the waveforms of a functioning sampler with an oscilloscope. The goal is to expose the nature of the digital sampler, why it makes the sounds it does, and why circuitbending can make it sound so freaked out. Bring a notebook! (ps -- you can check out the details of the WTPA as I get them done at http://www.narrat1ve.com/)

3:00 Intro to Video Bending with Ed Bear (NYC)
Buy Tickets Here
The disappearing vocabulary of analog video is at once the signature of the 20th century and a powerful tool for recording, performance, and learning. A basic understanding of the video signal turns any television into an oscilloscope and all electronics into potential audio-visual instruments. The best way to learn is doing, and that is the focus of this class. Techniques of filtering and manipulating NTSC video signals will be demonstrated on working instruments frankensteined from old equipment. All Ages.

Concert Series 3 - Sat, Apr 26, 7:00 PM (DCTV) - $10
7:00 Gunung Sari (NYC)
7:45 Speaker Synth (NYC)
8:30 F4RM (Mexico)
9:15 Bryan Eubanks (NYC) Vic Rawlings (NYC)
10:00 alias pail (NYC)
10:45 Big A little a (NYC)
11:30 Spunkytoofers (Backcountry Ozarks)
12:15 Burnkit 2600 (Connecticut)

Official Website: http://bentfestival.org