Suite 100 Gallery is excited to announce a group show dedicated to the fine art of circuit bending. Each featured artist uses a unique approach to explore and express through this medium, a popular underground movement.
Reclaim is a fully hands-on show, which strives to bring this marginalized form into the light of fine arts. The show will feature a wall-sized interactive installation by Michael Robson, the detailed circuit drawings of K. E. Alexander Jr., and smaller inventive instruments by Christopher Olsen.
Circuit bending is a contemporary electronic-based art that implements experimental audio short-circuiting. This rebellious hobby represents the birth of the new age of experimental musical forms and the phenomenon of breaking the music industry down into the ever-growing independent home studio.
Each artist exhibited contributes to the show's larger conversation. Through exploring the aesthetic beauty and possibilities of circuitry, a dialogue is formed that is synonymous with our generation.s attempts to digest the evolving flux of technology. Reclaim is just one of those attempts, releasing the underground world of circuit-bending into the art community.s daily dialogue, and hopefully validating the ever-growing number of curious "benders."
Update! To hear what Michael Robson has to say about himself and his work as a circuit bender, check out our interview with him.
Christopher Olson's statement on "Reclaim":
Born in Seattle in1976, I started playing piano at the age of six. At nine, I began teaching myself percussion – any surface became a drum as I beat on it with wooden kite sticks that I would pretended were drum sticks. I had a small tape recorder that I would used to record my piano playing and the percussive sounds. I'd would press the buttons down halfway to slow down the sound, or put tape over the erase head to "overdub" my tracks.
I first learned of circuit bending while attending college for sound engineering. An instructor of mine had organized a club that made these Speak and Math toys make strange, glitchy sounds. I started reading up, talking to other benders, slowly building my workshop in my bedroom.
My favorite part of bending is finally coming across that magic bend after poking around for hours – the one that causes Elmo to sound like a death metal singer or Furby to speak a garbled alien language.
My projects represent the liberating of sounds from these electronics, beyond anything the manufacturers intended or imagined. I enjoy working with vintage toys, which gives my works a feeling of simultaneously familiar and alien.
K.E. Alexander Jr.'s statement on "Reclaim":
This work is part of a continuing examination of vernacular architecture and technologies. I use uninterrupted/continuous lines, repetition of forms, and negative space to evaluate professionally engineered systems. These tools of communication go to the core of any drawn or planned idea for development. My work always begins with the premise that intuition and direct expression is indispensable when trying to bring any complex system into reality.
