Background: Association of experimental electronics is a group of people interested in exploring the boundaries of electronic medium. We build sound-producing devices, play concerts, build installations, arrange workshops and build experimental gear for other artists. We work mainly in the realm of electronic waste. We do this because we consider thrown away objects to be more interesting and ecologically viable than the cutting edge technology. Our basic principle is that electronic sound is all about alternations of current, so any device that produces or alternates the current can be used as an experimental instrument. Anything from circuitbent toys to hardware-hacked vacuumcleaners can be used. Art-automation: Very early on we found out that experimental devices seem to have a life of their own. We have never tried to master our instruments, like traditional musicians master theirs, but have been more interested in connecting strange instruments to each other, in the way that end result is unexpected. The next step for us has been to step further into the realm of art-automation. We have been attempting to build sound-producing machines instead of musical instruments for a year now. It has not been a very big step, since most of our instruments are quite chaotic anyway. Artificial stupidity: Robot-building is usually associated with the artificial intelligence, the idea that we can build intelligent devices if we have enough computing power to simulate intelligent structures. Our approach is different, we call it artificial stupidity. The main idea is to take a large amount of simple experimental instruments and connect those to eachother in a complex way. This way we can get a very complex and unpredictable end-result from very simple elements. We know, that this sort of method will not give us a possibility to build anything very intelligent, but it does give us a possibility to build machines that produce the kind of art that can surprise even their makers. Our thinking is related to the circuit-bending philosophy, although unorthodox, where even plain stupid connections are intuitively used in order to find surprising and new sounds.
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