Biography

Kelly Heaton is a cross-disciplinary artist, engineer, and visionary who works with electricity. She is fascinated by what makes things alive and conscious. Her art is hard to categorize because it vibrates conceptually and often literally, too. Heaton uses oscillating electronics to explore the building blocks of machine intelligence and to create circuits with life-like behaviors. Her artistic circuits are conduits for her core message that we are electrical beings connected in a universal system. Humans can be electrifying, illuminating, and magnetic, or we can abuse our power and short-circuit. Heaton wants to blow your mind in a positive way—as a friendly invitation to mutual growth and heartfelt expansion.

Kelly Heaton is not your usual electrical engineer. She is an intuitive artist who seeks beauty and meaning in circuits, which she treats as tools for modern magic. Circuits are the material foundation of all electronic art, but most people focus on software instead of hardware. There is a practical reason for this: software is the user-friendly digital interface for a computer, whereas hardware is the fragile (and potentially dangerous) anatomy of the machine. Heaton argues that the craft of electrical engineering is cultural heritage worthy of our attention and preservation. Hardware is the physical body in the mind-body dichotomy of artificial intelligence. Her humanist style of circuit-bending invites us to see computers as material artifacts of human ingenuity. Heaton participates in the open source and maker movements to support free-spirited creativity on the frontier of artificial wilderness.

Spirituality is a recurring theme for Heaton, who wants to show us that chakras, acupuncture, Thangkas, and mother boards are energy diagrams with common physical laws. Her experimental practice of “Electronic Naturalism” demonstrates that simple, analog electronic circuits can generate birdsong and insect chirping with an uncanny life-like quality. In her early work, she dissected popular animatronic toys such as Furby and Tickle Me Elmo to look for soul in their machinery. Heaton inspires us to think about our definition of nature, the mystery of consciousness, and the global circuit in which we are all connected.

Kelly Heaton is a creative polymath. In addition to her work as an artist and engineer, she is a naturalist, self-taught perfumer, fashionista, Tarot reader, practicing yogi, mushroom hunter, foodie, and a former innovation consultant in the field of diabetes care. Her brand Circuit Icon offers artistic printed circuit editions as instruments of goodwill, ethical capitalism, and spiritual awakening. She is a graduate of Yale and the MIT Media Laboratory with former representation by Ronald Feldman Fine Arts, NYC.

Heaton's art has been featured in exhibitions in the United States and internationally, including the DeCordova Sculpture Park and Museum, Ronald Feldman Fine Arts and bitforms gallery. Her work has been reviewed in numerous publications, including Le Monde, The New York Times, New York Magazine, NY Arts, The Village Voice, Los Angeles Times, USA Today, Hyperallergic, Artnet.com and Art das Kunstmagazin. She is the recipient of grants from The Peter S. Reed Foundation, Creative Capital, LEF Foundation, Council for the Arts at MIT, and the Jacob K. Javits Fellowship Program. In 2001, she won the L'Oreal Promotion Prize in the Art and Science of Color for her research with physical pixels. She has been awarded residencies at New York University, Otis College of Art and Design, MIT Center for Advanced Visual Studies, Duke University, Tortuga Escondida, and Art Interactive. She has been a speaker for Make, Hackaday, Carnegie Mellon, and many others. Kelly Heaton received her Bachelor of Art degree from Yale University in 1994, and her Master of Science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2000.