TECHNOLOGY
REINVENTING THE NERD
Technical and mechanical knowledge infused with originality and enthusiasm: Two Bit Circus inspires everyone from attractions insiders to schoolchildren
Kath Hudson, journalist, Attractions Management S
ince 2012, Two Bit Circus, a group of entertainment engineers, has been playing around with robots, lasers and fire, creating quirky, exciting, interactive experiences for wide-
eyed audience and co-founders Brent Bushnell and Eric Gradman have been steadily challenging the assumption that science and engineering are boring. We talk to Bushnell to find out more about the Los Angeles-based collective.
How did Two Bit Circus come about? I met Eric about seven years ago. We were both STEM [science, technology, engineering and maths] guys. He was building robots for the military and I was making video games, but we both wanted to be playing with other tech. The first night we met in person we stayed up until 4am building things. We began to find other people in LA who got similar enjoyment out of fabrication and all that stuff, so we formed a little band of nerds.
You don’t seem like nerds in the way you present and engage with audiences. Has the world got nerds wrong? One of the opportunities we have at the moment is to rebrand what it is to be a nerd. There’s a negative cultural narrative around the sciences and maths. There’s a traditional thinking that engineering is all pencil ties and lab coats, but that’s all wrong: there are lasers and fires and robots and all sorts of neat things which make engineering, maths and science
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really exciting. People who fit the role of engineer are still playful and fun.
You want to inspire a future generation of inventors, so who inspired and continues to inspire you? On many levels, Eric and I inspire each other. My dad was a big inspiration and it’s fun to be back around my family as a peer. [Bushnell’s father is entrepreneur and engineer Nolan Bushnell, founder of Atari and other video game companies]. I read an interesting study which
Brent Bushnell (top) and Eric Gradman, the founders of Two Bit Circus and the STEAM Carnival
underscored the fact that there’s no shortage of hard problems to work on, and that’s where the genesis of inspiring inventors came from: how could us nerds inspire an army of inventors and what impact could they have on the world?
You and Eric shared a vision of making STEM fun, but how easy was it to find a way of bringing that idea to fruition? It extended from our core team pretty naturally. Leading up to the creation of Two Bit Circus, we were always playing with technology. We didn’t have a business model in the beginning. We were just playing with stuff and taking it to parties. We did fundraisers and parties for companies like Amazon and Intel, with up to 10,000 guests. Then we made a music video for the
band Ok Go’s single This Too Shall Pass. We built a huge Rube Goldberg Machine in a warehouse and the video went viral with 45 million views. Loads of parents and teachers called us to say the kids loved it.
AM 4 2014 ©Cybertrek 2014
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