Do you like stuff but are tired of how it affects your work/thoughts/creative processes?! Come to the reception for
<[AGENDA BENDER (Transcender B Therender) BEND.THEBEGINNING&THEEND ZINE]>
A humorous zine is about affordance theory and using hacking/circuit-bending to deprogram the influence that devices have on your artistic engagement. It's disposable purpose is to educate in chance electronics, as well as cultivating anti-authoritarian approaches to creative practices. It's inspired by Vilem Flusser's book 'Towards a Philosophy of Photography', concerning the apparatus' effect on the behavior of the individual interacting with it, but written with accessabillity in mind. This means that the zine doesn't prepare one to indulge in advanced engineering, nor highly academical discussions, but instead it's fun, chill and creative.
It features 22 pages of:
- Tutorials, graphics and poetry
- An interactive step-by-step guide on how to ditch your prior understanding of a device and giving it new purpose
- A recipe for a circuit-bending stripboard tool
The guide also features a blank page for each step, intended for note-taking and mapping out your process.
What is circuit bending: Circuit bending is the creative, chance-based customization of the circuits within electronic devices such as low-voltage, battery-powered guitar effects, children's toys and digital synthesizers to create new musical or visual instruments and sound generators.
Emphasizing spontaneity and randomness, the techniques of circuit bending have been commonly associated with noise music, though many more conventional contemporary musicians and musical groups have been known to experiment with "bent" instruments. Circuit bending usually involves dismantling the machine and adding components such as switches and potentiometers that alter the circuit. (Wikipedia.org)
In the spirit of this zine, however, circuit bending doesn't just apply to electronic devices. It applies to your neural circuits as well. Circuit bending as a practice is experimenting, rewiring a signal path, and that signal path may have been inside you all along.