The Machine Doesn’t Care
And so for this generation there is a kind of quest for these lost artifacts of our youth. They were lost because our parents discarded of them, or they died when their components finally failed; or we sold them or gave them away. Now we remember them and want them back so we can reconnect with our childhoods in some way, in essence to re-experience all this vested meaning bound up in our old Nintendos and Segas.
Enter circuit bending, an artistic discipline that is both a part of this attempt at reconnection and a critique of it. Circuit benders take techno-artifacts that everyone else considers garbage and transform them into something current, living, and aesthetic. Bending helps us step out of the arrow of progress for a moment and critically evaluate notions of obsolescence, time, and memory. This ability to create a dialogue about time and memory is not only by way of association however; it turns out that the act of circuit bending itself contains inherent analogies to the manner in which human memory functions.
The field of neuroscience tells us that human memory doesn’t occur in some single portion of the brain. In order to recall an event the entire brain must reconfigure itself into a perfect series of interconnected on/off states, much like a circuit board.
