Circuit bending build your own alien instruments

Acknowledgments Who supports the arts?

The big names come to mind, the foundations and institutions whose grants go a long way to endow board-approved art—art whose “viability,” often, is measured by an unshy degree of public acceptance. But what about art that is supported more by the maverick mind than the common nail?

History teaches us a few lessons here. Claude Monet’s eventual salons made his work known, but impressionism owes immeasurably to friends and fellow painters who sheltered Monet through his many destitute periods. Renoir, the same. And it’s well known that Vincent Van Gogh’s brother, Theo, kept Vincent happening during the very worst of times. Cézanne, considered by many the best example of the postimpressionist school, found in the simple support of fellow artist Pissarro a reevaluation of his own treatment of color and subject, prompting wide discussion that thereafter became key to interpreting a painting’s “space.”

Established in this way, via the “grassroots” of family and community, waves of new art were ushered in—cubism, surrealism, expressionism, kinetic and pop art, “abstract” and multimedia art of all types. For the most part, we know of these arts and their artists not because of their later work, as it might seem, but rather because of their early work, unrecognized by the public yet supported by friends and family. And this, not surprisingly, is exactly how it went with circuit-bending.

I’ve never been offered a grant to circuit-bend or teach, nor have I ever applied for one. In fact, what has now become the worldwide circuit-bending movement was funded only with the spare change in my pocket (the other pocket had a hole in it). Luckily, the technology of circuit-bending required nothing more!

Looking back to the initial days of my discovery process, I find but one aspect of these times that coalesced bending into being: the 1960s counterculture. Were it not for the hippie ideal of “mind expansion,” there simply would have been no appreciative audience for my early work.

In fact, the Midwest was teeming with individuals not only unaware of experimental art but downright hostile toward anything that challenged the status quo: With regard to stand-still Americanism, “love it or leave it” was the only guiding light offered.

So let me acknowledge that the underground society of these new American patriots, with flowers in their hair and songs of revolution on their tongues, found circuit-bending to be “mind bending,” and gave my art the only refuge possible.

My musician and techie friends of the era helped me at the workbench and on stage; they sheltered me and my instruments from unfriendly audiences, and provided a kinship that still lives to this day.