http://www.blipfestival.org/

THE TANK and 8BITPEOPLES are pleased to present the Blip Festival, a four-day celebration of over 30 international artists exploring the untapped potential of low-bit videogame consoles and home computers used as creative tools. Familiar devices are pushed in new directions with startling results — Nintendo Entertainment Systems and Game Boys roaring with futuristic floor-stomping rhythms and fist-waving melody, art-damaged Sega hardware generating fluctuating and abstracted video patterns — and that’s only the beginning. An exploration of the chiptune idiom and its close relatives, the Blip Festival is the biggest and most comprehensive event in the history of the form, and will include daily workshops, art installations, and nightly music performances boasting an international roster larger and more far-reaching than any previous event of its kind. Small sounds at large scales pushed to the limit at high volumes — the Blip Festival is an unprecedented event that is not to be missed.

What Rhizome news said:

November 22, 2006
Blip Goes the Festival
Next week nearly forty international artists and musicians will visit New York, many for the first time, to revive a defunct downtown bank with a treasure trove of 8-bit wonders. The Blip Festival is the world’s largest-ever chiptune event, and will feature most of the field’s major players, including Crazy Q (Stockholm), Nullsleep (NYC), YMCK (Tokyo), and others, each performing live music and visual on old Ataris, Commodore 64s, Game Boys, and other old school machinery. Nightly live concerts will be balanced by screenings and workshops, during the day, from November 30-December 3. The festival is co-organized by The Tank, a nonprofit whose Bent Festival of circuit-bending arts was a precursor to Blip, and 8-Bit Peoples, a New York-based collective of ‘musicians and artists dedicated to exploring the audiovisual style of low-bit video games and home computers,’ including some of the most active practitioners within this genre. The Blip Festival is a partner event in R! hizome’s Tenth Anniversary Festival of Art and Technology. We recommend reserving your tickets today. – Rhizome.org