NEW YORK -- The city's tinkerers turned out in force for Bent 2005, an arts festival devoted to dismantling electronics to see what sounds they can make, often with loud results.
Held last week at city arts venue The Tank, the second annual circuit-bending festival attracted crowds to various free events and paid concerts -- all designed to give techies and newbies alike a chance to learn the subtle art of "circuit bending."
Circuit bending involves opening up and playing with the wiring in gadgets like electronic instruments and toys to produce different sounds. While children's toys are a popular choice and an easy place to start, many different gizmos can be "bent," all with different results.
Bent 2005 featured circuit-bending labs in the basement of The Tank's Midtown Manhattan location and workshop activities like Nintendo and Game Boy hacking. Come nightfall, the events wrapped up with concerts featuring bending musicians like DJ Sniff, Lorin Edwin Parker and Joker Nies.
The festival started last April as a way for people to learn to make music with electronics, said Daniel Greenfeld, an artistic director and co-founder of The Tank. Its popularity has enabled enthusiasts to continue bending this spring as well.
"It's been a pretty amazing success," Greenfeld said.
On Wednesday afternoon, visitors marched into The Tank's basement, where they were greeted by cheap electronic keyboards and toys. Items in hand, they used soldering irons, alligator clips and a variety of Radio Shack-reminiscent electronic accoutrements -- knobs, wires and the like -- to take apart and modify the toys, filling the small room with electronic squeaks, squalls and blips.
Noah Vawter, who came down from Cambridge, Massachusetts, to try his hand at bending, played with an old drum machine, manipulating alligator clips connected to different parts of the machine's innards to change its tones.
Vawter said he used to be against bending because the music made with bent objects couldn't be reproduced. Evidently, he's had a change of heart.
"Just playing around in the last hour, I'm impressed," he said.
At a workshop, instructor Gijs Gieskes, a veteran bender, showed how to use regular audio cassettes to make short tape loops that play the same sound over and over.
Participants also learned how to take apart a Walkman and attach a simple potentiometer, which, with its knob, allows for adjustment of the amount of juice going into the machine, thereby slowing or speeding the Walkman.
To make tape loops, attendees crowded around small tables on The Tank's ground floor, unscrewing and then popping open plastic cassette cases.
Reid Bingham, 19, a Rutgers student, set to work unraveling the brown tape innards and cutting them from the plastic spools. He and a friend have been bending toys since last year, taking them apart and recording sounds resulting from their random manipulations.
"I'm really interested in using technology in ways it's not supposed to be used," he said.
Eventually, Bingham got his handheld tape player to emit triumphantly a fuzzy snippet of an old pop song. He smiled as it played, and others around him who hadn't yet completed the process seemed impressed with his results.
