Nicolas Collins wrote the book Handmade Electronic Music: The art of Hardware Hacking, which you can read online here. The performance he presented was Salvage (Guiyu Blues) For 7 performers trying to reanimate dead circuitry. This circuit bending performance was a little different from the usual statics and squarewaves noise. There was something jokish and funny about the seven performers on stage stumbling their hands on each other trying to reach or find an enclosure for the circuit that sounded interesting using the whole 14 hands!
Lots of times this performances are monophonic and it was interesting to see the dead circuitry becoming poly. This is the picture of the performance in SMC2009.
You can also see the video here, but it's of his students performing in Tokyo, in 2008. From Nicholas' site, an explanation of how it works:
Seven players attempt to re-animate deceased and discarded electronic circuitry (cell phones, computer motherboards, fax machines, etc), using test probes to make connections between a simple homemade circuit and the electronic corpse; feedback between my circuit and the components on the dead board produce complex patterns of oscillation, that change with the slightest movement of the probes. The seventh performer "conducts" by periodically signaling the others to try to freeze the current sound texture by holding their hands as still as possible.
All pictures taken from Nicolas Collin's official site.
