Making Art with Electricity: A Q&A With Kelly Heaton

Kelly Heaton forged an idiosyncratic path into engineering. Today, her objective is to “unite art and science in a Yin Yang of emotional and intellectual creativity.”

C.J. Abate: Our content and engineering teams have spent months doing research and prep work for the Summer Circuits 2022 special edition of Elektor. In February, while researching electronics-related projects posted on Twitter, your painting “Vladimir Putin (the operational amplifier)” caught my attention, and I immediately notified my colleagues about it. Since then, we have enjoyed reading through your website and looking at your work. Before we get into your background and your present endeavors, can you tell us about the Putin piece?  Kelly Heaton: My portrait of Vladimir Putin depicts the current president of Russia and former KGB intelligence officer hiding behind an “operational amplifier” so as to appear inhuman. The painting is part of a series that includes Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton. I was inspired by events leading up to the 2016 United States presidential election, during which all three politicians were involved in scandals related to information technology. Cyberwar had matured into a serious threat: fake news usurped responsible journalism and social media was weaponized. Vladimir Putin wielded untold power over America through cyber espionage. Hillary Clinton got blindsided by her inappropriate use of email. Donald Trump tweeted his way into the Oval Office. Conspiracy theorists linked all three characters in a narrative that may or may not be true, but what we do know is that human consciousness was merging with machine intelligence to form a strange chimera. In the process, it felt like the world was going mad. We had entered the age of Homo electricus.
  Abate: Elektor has a diverse community of electronics engineers, students, and makers from all over the world. It is always interesting to ask our members about their first experiences with technology. When did you become interested in electronics? Were you inspired by a relative, a friend, or a teacher? Or did you simply find yourself reverse-engineering a radio one day?
 
Heaton: Growing up in the ’70s and ’80s, I was fortunate to have a Commodore 64 and Atari game console, though I didn’t hack into them at the time. I enjoyed playing Zork and writing snippets in Turtle, but it was my brother, Clay Heaton, who really got into software and has since become a great creative coder. Programming wasn’t that interesting to me because it was trapped in a computer, which I saw more as an ugly machine than a vector for digital creativity. My teachers didn’t encourage me to learn engineering; unfortunately, there were gender and nerd biases about electronics that kept a lot of kids from getting involved back then. Things started to change in the mid ’90s when I dropped out of veterinary school and moved to Boston for my Master of Fine Arts. My art studio was adjacent to the office of MIT graduate Kevin Brown of Brown Innovations who enlightened me to the possibility that I could make art with electricity. This was a shocking revelation: it had never occurred to me that ordinary people build electronic devices. For my first project, I took an electronic firetruck toy and reshaped it in the form of a spaceship by removing the plastic case and reinserting the “guts” into an aluminum reflector harvested from a shop lamp. I finished the piece with a Marvin the Martian character, and the transformation was magical for me. One year later, thanks to Kevin’s encouragement, I dropped out of art school and enrolled in a Master of Science program at the MIT Media Lab.
 
Abate: And what about art? What are your earliest memories of painting or drawing?
 
Heaton: I have been an artist for as long as I can remember. I have a touch of synesthesia, so all types of media feel like art supplies, but I constrained my creative freedom in grade school because representational images got me attention as a “good” artist. Drawing came to me more easily than form and color. I was raised by an intellectual family of physicians, naturalists, and very creative people although not trained engineers. When I was five years old, we moved to the wooded suburbs of Raleigh, North Carolina, where I had acres of wilderness and farmland to explore. Nature became my favorite source of inspiration. My bedroom was filled with plush and live animals in terrariums and shoeboxes, but this creature menagerie wasn’t enough for me. I remember wanting to “build animals,” though I didn’t have the skills to manifest my ideas. For example, I wanted to make a mechanical squirrel or bat that would fly on tracks suspended from the ceiling of my bedroom. I also wanted to recreate the spatial soundscape of a frog chorus. The viscerally sonic experience of Spring Peepers became dear to my heart thanks to my mother, who took me on “amphibian alert” excursions with the North Carolina Museum of Natural History. My fascination with nature compelled me to search for my artistic voice in circuits with life-like qualities, though it took more than three decades for me to figure this out.
 
Abate: While your current artwork often involves to technical concepts, images, and components, I assume your early (e.g., high school) artwork did not focus on electronics as much. Or am I wrong?
 
Heaton: Correct. I was a visual artist working with traditional media. It did not occur to me that I could (or would even want to) make an electronic device from scratch, and hacking seemed taboo. Electronics were unappealing to me because they appeared alien and severe compared with art and ecology. I didn’t like math for similar reasons — electronics, engineering, and science all felt unemotional and bereft of soul. The only reason I found my way to electrical engineering is that I’m fascinated with the spark of life. This first took me into biological science, where I may have stayed were it not for my artistic disposition, disdain for animal cruelty, and a Mary Shelley-style obsession with bringing things to life. I wasn’t satisfied with traditional art either, and so I forged an idiosyncratic path into engineering. It is my career objective to unite art and science in a Yin Yang of emotional and intellectual creativity.
 
Abate: At which point in your journey did engineering first intersect with art? What was your first circuit design?
 
Heaton: It took me a decade of collaboration and self-study before I could design my own circuits. My earliest electronic art dates to the late ’90s when I was a student at the MIT Media Lab. I am indebted to Michael Hawley, Steven Gray, Robert Poor, Golan Levin, Scott Snibbe, Saul Griffith, Paul Pham, and Yael Maguire. Steven Gray was my most important collaborator and essential to engineering The Physical Pixel Project (2000), Reflection Loop (2001), and Live Pelt (2003). The following year, I left academia and moved to Switzerland for a job with Roche Diabetes Care. I spent my free time developing works of visual art with embedded electronics. I was lonely in my studio with no engineering collaborator, yet determined to use discrete hardware to demystify the fundamentals of electronic design. To the best of my ability, I eschewed code and the “black box” of integrated circuitry. I even aspired to build my own components from scratch until I realized this goal would consume my entire career (after discovering the work of Claude Paillard, who meticulously crafts his own tube transistors). I settled on building circuits with discrete analog electronic components that are visible and tactile, meaning through-hole. Analog electrical engineering proved very hard for me to learn. Thankfully, Forrest M. Mims III had published hundreds of schematics for beginners, and I credit him as my most valuable electronics teacher. Still, my early circuits broke so frequently that I left them in my art as evidence of process. Layers of pedagogy and circuits — live and dead — became my signature style for The Parallel Series (2012). If I had to pick my first true circuit design, it would be a chirping cricket from 2012 that I made using a 555 timer oscillator, an astable multivibrator, a transistor amplifier, and a piezo buzzer. Note that 555 timers and op-amps felt like cheating because they are ICs, but at the time I didn’t understand their function well enough to design a discrete component alternative.
  Abate: Let’s turn to your education. You studied urban planning and ecology at Yale University in the early 1990s. Then, in 1998, you began a graduate degree at MIT. At which point did your academic interests shift from urban planning to electrical engineering?
 
Heaton: Confession: I was never interested in urban planning. I went to Yale with a desire to combine art, philosophy, and science, but they didn’t have an interdisciplinary studies program and I was frustrated by the undergraduate art program. I didn’t like my options for a major (philosophy turned out to be terrifyingly dry) and, to be honest, I was a wayward soul for most of college. I gravitated towards the forestry program because their classes went on field trips into the woods and this was my place of refuge in childhood. Fortunately, professor John Wargo took me under his wing and became my primary advisor. Back then, Yale didn’t offer an undergraduate ecology degree, but they did have a wildcard called the “Special Divisional Major.” I wasn’t allowed to invent my course of study, but I could bricolage coursework from existing programs. The catch was that I had to negotiate buy-in from three professors, and the resulting course of study didn’t gel entirely with my interests. Still, my Yale education taught me systems thinking, adaptability, and the price of independence. I continued searching after graduation, failing to get a job in ecology but succeeding to be accepted into veterinary school at North Carolina State University. Vet school didn’t feel right either, so I applied for a Master of Fine Arts at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts University. When that felt wrong, I switched to the MIT Media Lab where finally everything started to make sense. I learned to never give up in the pursuit of my dreams because, no matter how strange or circuitous the path, determination eventually yields clarity.
 
Abate: What was it like studying and creating at the MIT Media Lab from 1998 to 2000? To put things in perspective, I’ll list just a few of the notable tech-related happenings and inventions associated with that period: Apple’s iMac (1998), Google’s founding (1998), Intel’ Pentium III (1999), Jack Kilby’s Nobel Prize in Physics (2000), and the Y2K bug. The “maker” revolution was just around the corner.
 
Heaton: Amazing. I was incredibly fortunate to be at the MIT Media Lab during such an optimistic and fertile time. People were openly engaged in projects that often failed in a conventional sense but fostered a climate of radical innovation. It wasn’t perfect; there was a lot of vaporware and maneuvering, but there was also a remarkable expansion of human potential. My advisor, the late-great Michael Hawley, was an enthusiastic advocate for cross-disciplinary creativity. I took Neil Gershenfeld’s How to Make Almost Anything class, which felt like ground zero of the maker movement. I was a student of John Maeda’s Design By Numbers, where I learned to code and witnessed the genesis of Processing as an accessible language for artists. I got to see and hear Joe Paradiso’s monolithic modular synthesizer. I took Paul Horrowitz’s Art of Electronics class through an exchange program with Harvard. Robert Poor shared his programmable iRX platform for creative hardware, which was a visionary predecessor to Arduino. Sherry Turkle’s research on computers and child development gave me insight into the psychology of human-machine symbiosis. I got to meet Marvin Minsky. I made an outrageous sculpture called The Pool (2001) with 400 reprogrammed Furbies and met Furby’s inventors, Dave Hampton and Caleb Chung. I have to pinch myself when I think of my privilege to be at the Media Lab during those golden years of creativity.
 
Abate: During our first conversation in March 2022, you noted that you are drawn to analog electronics. What is so appealing about analog?
 
Heaton: I observed the rapid migration towards digital modalities and felt someone needed to put a stake in the ground defining the media foundations of electronic art. Every electronic device is fundamentally analog: a rule-based system of physical components by which electricity is shaped into useful patterns. Analog electrical engineering is to electronic art what pigments, brushes, and canvas are to painting. It is a creative medium that warrants canonization in the history of art. This has not yet happened, at least not adequately, because it’s no simple task to build a conceptual bridge between the mentalities of art and science (or analog and digital). Feeling and logic are notoriously at odds as polarities of the human mind. Most art professionals are not engineers and vice versa. Moreover, it’s critical that society maintain working knowledge of analog electronic design and not become wholly dependent upon corporations to supply us with widgets for digital access. (Thank goodness for the maker movement!) Engineers often say to me that analog design is too hard compared with digital, but I equate challenges with opportunity. For starters, improving the chip shortage crisis is low-hanging fruit for an analog revolution. My advocacy for analog electronics is not only political, though. There is tremendous insight and expressive potential to be gained from working with continuous waveforms. I believe that advancements in our understanding of emotion will arise from analog electrical engineering because feelings are not digital in nature. Consciousness is far greater than a digital algorithm running on cerebral hardware: it is an emergent phenomenon of our entire physical being. There is no digital ghost in the machine; the analog machine is a ghost-maker.
 
Abate: While looking at your website, I was immediately drawn in by The Parallel Series (2012). The I’ve been thinking about a line from the description: “The Parallel Series, through the intersection of nature, energy, and spirituality, asks what does one gain when a painting is imbued with electronics; and what does one lose when the electricity is gone.” Have you answered those questions?
 
Heaton: I spend a lot of time contemplating what makes something qualify as “alive.” As far as I know, the only difference between a living organism and a corpse is that the body of a living organism is animated by electrical activity. This explains my early obsession with electronic toys such as Furby and Tickle Me Elmo: I know that plush dolls aren’t alive, but animatronic toys are life-like in an alien way that is categorically different from an ordinary teddy bear. Following this line of inquiry, The Parallel Series asks: “what happens to a painting when it intersects with functional circuitry?” Clearly, the painting itself does not accrue electrical qualities and thus remains corpse-like, but what about the electronics and the artwork as a whole? Most people would agree that a functioning circuit is more interesting than a non-functioning version of the same; but if the non-functioning circuit is made with artistic intent, then it has enduring resonance as a conceptual statement. Artistic intent changes everything. Artifacts inherit mystery when formerly dynamic properties cease, and legend is often more interesting than reality. Plus, nothing is truly static — everything changes albeit on different scales of time. Old paintings are restored in the template of an artist’s hand, thus modifying or even replacing the original strokes. All forms of electronic art will eventually cease to function, and some will be impossible to restore due to a lack of schematics and component obsolescence. This presents an interesting dilemma for conservationists. Fortunately, restoration is not necessary for a work of art to live on as a catalyst of thought.
  Abate: Your Printed Circuit Bird is wonderful. Describe the process of planning, designing, and testing it.
 
Heaton: Thank you! I think you are referring to a peach-colored electronic bird that I made in 2021 (NB: I use the phrase “printed circuit bird” as a punny descriptor for all of my work in this genre). The circuit is a design from 2019 that I call Deep Fake Birdsong, and I’m really proud of it because my development spanned years of breadboard experimentation. Remember: I am not an academically trained electrical engineer, I am an outsider engineer in the form of a stubborn visual artist who miraculously survived MIT and later taught myself to build circuits because I want my art to feel alive. I have cobbled together hundreds of schematics, exploded thousands of components, and basically reinvented analog synth design because I did not know what I was doing. In my pursuit of birdsong, I started with the classic “canary doorbell” circuit that has been around for decades. It uses an audio transformer to generate a remarkably life-like squawk that is brighter or duller depending upon the resistor and capacitor values. My next challenge was to modulate the bird’s voice, which is to say, introduce a song pattern. I focused on simple elements that I could master, like the astable multivibrator, and pushed these building blocks to do anything interesting for my art. It took me countless hours of trial-and-error to discover that oscillators connected with passive filters form patterns that are easily modified, and that signal complexity grows nonlinearly with each additional oscillator. Nikola Tesla famously said, “If you want to think of the secrets of the universe, think in terms of energy, frequency, and vibration.” Indeed, I found that systems of oscillators are the building blocks of pattern generation such as we hear in a bird’s song, thanks to electrical impulses in their brain. This insight led to my hypothesis that human consciousness arises from systems of coupled analog oscillators. My printed circuit birds are mascots of analog electronic intelligence with only five adjustable oscillators, aka five pairs of neurons. Whether or not my claims about human consciousness are true, analog oscillation reflects how I see myself as an electrical being.
 
Abate: Your work brings together electronics, art, and philosophy. I anticipate that your projects will inspire some innovators in Elektor’s community to begin exploring how to use various disciplines, including electronics, to express themselves. Do you recommend any online or in-person groups or communities that they can follow or join? Are there any other artist/engineers they should check out?
 
Heaton: Open your mind and heart. Appreciate the incredible biodiversity of Earth. Go to museums and galleries to be inspired by art. Support the open-source maker movement and join your local makerspace. Build schematics and tweak them. Hackaday is a great online community and source of information. Adafruit is an awesome company with an inspirational YouTube channel. The Burning Man movement is full of people who combine tech with creativity and collaboration. Follow artists and makers on social media, actively engage in their posts, and watch who they follow to discover new creatives. Learn how to fail with a good attitude. Pivot your approach, but never give up on the pursuit of your dreams. Be courageous and generous because there is so much to learn, it can be overwhelming and counter-productive to go at it alone. Believe in yourself, work hard, ask questions, give credit, take risks, make mistakes, adapt, stay humble, be optimistic, and let good-natured determination lead you to success. I know so many talented people, it would be disingenuous to list only a few. That said, I am co-curating an exhibition for Fall of 2023, and my aim is to highlight artists who work with electronic hardware as a medium — so stay tuned! 
 

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Editor's note: This is an abridged version of Elektor's interview with Kelly Heaton. You can read the complete interview in Elektor Summer Circuits 2022.