Theatre Intangible LIVE » Theatre Intangible

Circuit Benders Ball Press Release

Circuit Benders Ball, Circuit-Bending, Concerts, Theatre Intangible LIVE 2 Responses »

Oct 172010

The Circuit Benders Ball is less than a week away. Here are some flyers and a press release. You can help by spreading them to the four corners of the Earth!

To apply for a press pass, send your credentials and a letter of intent to tony@theatreintangible.com. If you post a blog/article/podcast about the show and link our lineup page, I’ll put you on the guest list. Just send the link to the above e-mail.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Circuit Benders’ Ball
Open Lot | 1307 Jewell Street | Nashville, TN | 37207
Saturday October 23rd | Workshops 2pm-6pm | Performances 6:30pm -12:30am
All Ages | Festival Pass $10 | Free to Geek Media Expo Passholders | Workshops $15 each | Both Workshops + Festival Pass $30

Open Lot in association with Geek Media Expo and Theatre Intangible present the Circuit Benders’ Ball, a day-long celebration of the art of the bend. American artist Reed Ghazala accidentally discovered circuit bending in 1966 when a toy amplifier short circuited with his metal desk. Since then, circuit bending has become its own genre of visual and auditory art with masters such as Tim Kaiser and Thriftsore Boratorium advancing the field. The Circuit Benders’ Ball will feature two stages, eleven bands, an interactive art gallery, and two electronic workshops. The roster of talent includes Tim Kaiser, Thrifsore Boratorium, CMKT4, Ben Marcantel, Dave X, Jeremy Walker, Robbie Hunsinger, and more. The festival is $10, and the workshops are $15 each. If you buy a ticket for both workshops, you get into the festival for free. Geek Media Expo passholders also get in for free.

Workshops:

The workshops at the Circuit Benders Ball are for all ages and all skill levels. These classes are a perfect introduction to electronics for children, students, and everyone! The classes have limited seating and will fill up fast. To reserve your spot, send an e-mail to tony@theatreintangible.com. Specify which class(es) you want and how many spots you want to reserve.

Make Your Own Contact Mic w/ CMKT4 2pm-3:30pm $15

If you’ve ever frequented GetLoFi.com, then you’ve probably seen the famous bottle-cap contact mic. The mic’s creators will guide you in making your own, using their newly unveiled contact mic kit. Purchase additional kits for just $10 and take your creations home with you!

Circuit Bending 101 w/ Cincinatti’s Thriftsore Boratorium 4pm-6pm $10-$15

Don’t know one end of a soldering iron from another? Mark and Karl from the Cincinnati hackerspace Thriftsore Boratorium will show you how to make your electronic toys howl, squelch, sputter, and sing. The workshop is absolutely essential for beginners with enough fresh insights to make it worthwhile for the experienced bender. Learn soldering/bending tips, how to scope our your local thrift stores, what make the best bending candidates, and more. For $15, we will provide all the equipment you need, including components soldering tools. After the workshop, you get to keep your newly-bent bent toy!

Bring your own toy and electronics and pay only $10.

With performances by

Tim Kaiser, Thriftsore Boratorium, CMKT4, Ben Marcantel, DaveX, Jeremy Walker, Robbie Hunsinger, Theatre Intangible LIVE, Freya West Electric Burlesque w/ Score by Aaron Doenges, and The Blight Side of Life.

Cancellations: Mallachio, Aether Jag.

Visual Art & Video Projections by

Derek Schartung, Sabine Schlunk, Kelli Shay Hix, Austin Alexander, Alex Wolfe, Anderson Cook, Matt Christy, Tim Kaiser, CMKT4, Patricia Earnhardt, Devin Lamp, Thriftsore Boratorium, William Davis, Devin Bell, Jeremy Walker, Ben Marcantel.

Bios, links, and more information available at the official page.

Art:

Trash Humpers Nashville Premiere w/ Harmony Korine / Tons of Great Local Shows

Concerts, Theatre Intangible LIVE No Responses »

May 282010

Tonight after work, I’ll be headed to the Nashville premiere of Harmony Korine’s new film Trash Humpers at The Belcourt. Korine will be doing a Q&A after the film. You may not be aware that:

A. Gummo is one of my favorite films of all time.

B. Harmony shot a film with Gus Van Sant and Anthony Dod Mantle in my hometown of Mayfield, Kentucky, circa 1999.

C. I got to meet him at said time.

D. He asked me if I could score him “anything illegal.”

Good times. Think I should try to get him on an improv?

After the film, Square People Jazz Maturity (The Square People supergroup made entirely with Theatre Intangible participants: Chris Murray, Charlie Rauh, Craig Schenker, and Tommy Stangroom) and friends will be throwing at Trash Humpers afterparty at Little Hamilton. Here’s the lineup:

@ lil hamilton around 9:30pm $5
Reid and Wright
Deluxin’
CCR Headcleaner (San Francisco)
SQR PPL JAZZ MATURITY
Terrorish

Tomorrow evening, T.I. participants Charlie Rauh, Ezzy Harrold, Human Snowglobe JJ Jones, and (stop the press) yours truly Tony Youngblood will be performing an outdoor show outside the Scarritt Bennett Center’s art space Gallery F. I’ll be doing a dj set, sampling the other players and the audience’s recollections about the theme “Writing Home,” which may or may not become an T.I. improv podcast. The performances are actually an extension of an outdoor installation featuring thousands of written responses to the prompt, “Write a letter home.” Learn more at Gallery F’s page.

May 29 @ Gallery F 6pm

Excerpt from Gallery F’s press release:

The community is invited to add their letters home to the installation. The installation is being coordinated by gallery F.’s artists-in-residence: Sara Estes, Patricia Earnhardt, Brandon Donahue, Channing Bailey, Matt Christy, Sabine Schlunk, Ryan Hogan and Jared Freihoefer.

Dance and musical performances will take place within the installation. Megan Harrold and Charlie Rauh will perform a dance piece to live music, and various artists – including Maya Moore, Mike Hiegemann, Tony Youngblood, J.J. Jones, and Jared Freihoefer – will perform musical and dance improvisations.

Tomorrow night, Square People will join 84001 for another great lineup at Bettys Bar & Grill:

May 29 @ Bettys Bar & Grill 10PM FREE
Ttotals
84001
Squarepeople
Cody Gaisser

And then June 3rd, 84001 will be hosting another great lineup at Lil’ Hammy:

June 3 @ Little Hamilton 8PM DONATIONS
84001
Hobbledeions (Scott Martin from Hands Off Cuba, Forrest Bride, Cortney Tidwell, etc. solo project)
Ttotals
Pimlo (from Ohio)

Lots to do. See you at Trash Humpers and the shows!

E012 Live from Podcamp Nashville 03/07/2010

All Podcasts, Chris Murray, Concerts, Craig Schenker, JJ Jones, Lawrence Crow, Melody Holt, Post-WRVU Era, Theatre Intangible LIVE, Tony Youngblood (performing) No Responses »

Mar 072010

We had a great time at Podcamp Nashville this year, and our show went off without anything disastrous happening. Apparently, planning does pay off.

If you haven’t been reading our previous posts, Podcamp Nashville is an un-conference about podcasting, blogging, and social media. We rocked the socks off of twelve or so bewildered attendees with an improv set that fed audience live tweets into a speech synthesizer. Any tweet that used the hashtag #pcn10ore was read live on air, and we had no control over the content. One guest tweeted, “Are you guys on acid?” We peppered the tweets about us with tweets featuring random keywords that the audience picked.

All in all, not a bad day’s work. Featuring Craig Schenker on saxophone, Lawrence Crow on Supercollider, Chris Murray on Casio SK1 and various effects, JJ Jones on vocals, Melody Holt on vocals, and myself on tweet-synth and SKI. I mixed the show live on my Mackie 8 channel mixer and recorded on a Marantz digital field recorder. Aside from some compression and clicks and pop removal, I did very little post-production work on this show. You’ll hear it in it’s entirety, warts and all.

While I do wish the festival was more about podcasting (as the name implies) and less about business-focused social media strategies, I’m very pleased with our experience. (Ironically, that is the strength of the Barcamp principle — it’s about what the attendees and speakers want it to be about.) The major plus is that it got us tons of free press with write-ups in the Metromix and the Tennessean. And it was a pleasure to watch some of the other sessions, highlights being David Beronja‘s Skype session, Mitch Canter‘s WordPress session, and Dave Delaney‘s talk about geo-location services such as FourSquare. Maybe we’ll incorporate Foursquare in a future improv. (Ideas anyone?)

The tweet-to-speech program was a modified version of this open-source Python program by Jayesh Salvi. While Jayesh’s program searches for tweets in the logged-in user’s timeline, our program searches tweets based on keywords. I’m a complete Python programming newbie, and I couldn’t have done the modifications without the help of Bryan Kemp. I also added some lines to filter out certain words (like our hashtag #pcn10ore) and to replace others (Festival has an annoying habit of pronouncing the symbol “&” as “ampersand,” thus I replaced the “&”‘s with “and”‘s).

You can download our modified code here. (Right click and “save as”)

If you have Python, Fetival, and Curl (if you don’t, in a Linux command line, run “sudo aptitude install python curl festival”), you can use this script in your own musical adventures. Feel free to modify it as you will. To change the keyword, replace “keyword” in the following line with the keyword of your choice.

TWITTERURL=”http://search.twitter.com/search.json?q=keyword&rpp=30″

Add a “+” between words if you want to search for multiple keywords (ex. peanut+butter) and a “+OR+” if you want to search for one word or the other (ex. heaven+OR+hell). Replace “30” with the number of twitter messages you want the program to read before it ends. I left in the commented-out lines of the original program, so you can experiment. Future improvements: I’d like this program to automatically filter any tweets previously read through, and, of course, it would be nice to be able to plug in the options from the bash terminal when you run the program instead of in an editor. I’d love to see what you guys can do with this program.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 28:44 — 39.6MB)

Subscribe: iTunes | Android | RSS

Lead Us With Your Tweets – Podcamp Nashville Live Improv One Day Away

Theatre Intangible LIVE No Responses »

Mar 052010

If you live in the Nashville area, and you’re free around 1pm tomorrow, then get your butts over to Cadillac Ranch to see us do a live improv podcast at Podcamp Nashville. Sign up here. It’s free.

If you live too far or you have plans, you can still be a part of our show. Send us your Twitter messages with the hashtag #pcn10ore and your tweets will be read by a speech synthesizer live on our show. We have no control over what you send — you could tell the saxophonist to make more squeak sounds or wax poetic about your grandpa’s dentures. Whatever you send that includes the hashtag #pcn10ore WILL appear on our show.

But if you can make it, please do. We need more creative types at the conference. If you go by number of signees per session, it’s beginning to look like there’s a serious lack of interest in the creative side of things. Tech and business sessions have numbers through the roof (sessions with most signees use terms like “brand awareness” and “content strategy”), but the creative stuff is getting no love. I mean who wouldn’t think “live music improv podcast that incorporates your tweets” isn’t the coolest thing ever? Apparently, everyone attending Podcamp Nashville except the 13 people who signed up for our session.

Older Entries Newer Entries