There’s something strange going on at Eyebeam in New York City. The sights and sounds inside are typical for a club setting on a Saturday night: flashing lights, pulsing electronic music, and a crowd of hundreds of dancers. But a glance at the stage would reveal that there is something quite different about this scene. The DJ isn’t spinning records or mixing CDs, he’s holding a GameBoy — an original, green-screen, gray-brick Nintendo GameBoy from 1989. But he isn’t unwinding with a game of Tetris or Pokemon on this busy night — he’s providing the music. In fact, the GameBoy in his hands is the very source of the music the crowd is dancing to. His name is Josh Davis, but most folks know him as Bit Shifter - and tonight is the third night of Blipfest 2007.

Blipfest is an annual, four-day event held in New York City in a joint venture between art space The Tank and New York artist collective 8bitpeoples. It’s a celebration of all things lo-fi: from music to art, video, and beyond. Celebrating chip-tune culture, people from all over the world are here to perform and demonstrate their work — and Eyebeam is the perfect place to host it.

Eyebeam is an art and technology center that brings the worlds of art and technology together in the name of creativity. It’s all about challenging convention and educating people through hands-on experimentation. Artists learn to find new ways of interacting with technology to express themselves through hacking hardware and software while combining traditional mediums — such as crafting — with electronics. They also provide a space for events like Blipfest which openly encourages collaboration between artists and audiences.

Inside, a video display is adorning a wall with large, pixelated, low resolution images of well-known video game icons and characters that have been twisted, distorted, and glitched out in a psychedelic array of eye-candy. Pumping, synthesized music created by the familiar sounds of Atari 2600s, Commodore 64s, Nintendo Entertainment Systems, GameBoys — and various other obsolete consoles, computers, classic synthesizers and hacked electronic toys — fills the air. The crowd — made up of hipsters, hackers, artists, musicians, and gamers — is riding on a high-energy wave that sweeps through the place and raises it to frenzied, ecstatic level. Before long, you find yourself being caught up in it; amazed at what’s going on. These people are defining a generation that was defined by video games, computers, and the Internet. This isn’t just a culture; it’s world-wide movement.

Playing a hacked Atari 2600, Justin Emerson, from Danbury, Connecticut, is one-half of Burnkit 2600, an experimental electronic band. After his set during the open-mic, he explains to me the process of improvising over triggered loops programmed into a custom cartridge developed by a man named Paul Slocum, from Dallas, Texas, who is performing later in the evening under the name Treewave. Justin gives me a better look at his hacked Atari and describes what each component does and how the whole thing works. It’s a bit confusing, even though I understand the basic concepts of what’s going on under the hood. Regardless of the how and why, it makes for a dramatic sound that wins over the crowd and earns their praise by the end of his set.

“Let’s see… how did I end up here…,” Paul Slocum says as he laughs, slumped in a chair. Exhausted from having just flown into New York from his home in Dallas and enduring the energy-sapping temperatures outside which hover around freezing with storm clouds thickening the night sky, preparing to deliver on their threat of snow in the coming hours. “…I’ve been programming and doing music since I was a little kid, so… that’s, I guess, how I got here.” he adds. He describes his music as “8-bit shoe-gazer music”, heavily influenced by guitar-based music, although there are no guitars to be found among his gear for tonight’s set. Instead, you’ll find an Atari, two Commodore 64s, a PC running DOS, and, of all things, a dot-matrix printer. He wrote a sound-driver with a two-octave range and then rewrote the printer’s firmware, allowing him to create sequences for the print head which reproduces frequencies within that two-octave range by physically striking the paper against the roller. Despite the technical nature, the sound produced is a fascinating, organic series of tones that mesh well with Treewave’s over-all sound.

At about 8 pm, the show begins as each band and artist takes the stage and performs their sets. Their sounds and styles are varied, with some artists using nothing more than GameBoys for their sets while other artists blend Famicoms, GameBoys, and even PlayStation Portables with their guitars, drums, and vocals. Continuing well into the night, the packed house is standing-room-only as the music pulses and the crowd’s energy climbs ever higher. For a moment, it’s hard to think of these instruments as mere toys, video games, and computers. Some of them have been hacked so severely that they might not even be capable of their original function while others have become better, now sporting features that just weren’t possible in their hey-day. But before you get too deep into the technology, one has only to stop worrying about the magic going on behind the curtain to appreciate the scene for what it truly is: an evening of solidarity through multimedia. You’ll meet people of all ages and walks of life from all over the world; and although they may not speak English very well, or even at all, the universal language of music and the love for this old technology are little more than necessary to make up for the small barriers one has to overcome to make a connection. As the night goes on, eventually, it all comes to an end; but for the people who were there, it’s an experience they won’t soon forget.