Go To The 2006 Blip Festival This Weekend

Wired Blogs overlord Joel Johnson took time out of his busy schedule haranguing writers to sign away their souls and sending me animated GIFs of big-bottomed Latino women dancing in Powerpuff thongs in the shower to share with me his Flickr gallery of the 2006 Blip Festival, going on this weekend in NYC.

When asked if he would like to supply us with a blurb on what he thought, Joel responded: "Not much to say. I went, it was neat, it's still going on this weekend." The official website has more info, though:

The Blip Festival [is]... 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... 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.

The official site has lots of links to YouTube videos and MySpace pages of the artists who are involved. The beefy gentleman above is performing his work using only a GameBoy Advance SP. That has to be well worth checking out.

Blip Festival '06 [Flickr]