Biography

Kelly Heaton (b. 1972, Chapel Hill, NC) is an artist whose work investigates the continuity between living and electronic intelligence. Working primarily with analog circuitry, she constructs sculptures—birds, insects, botanical forms—whose behaviors emerge from the same electromagnetic principles that animate biological organisms. Her work proposes that consciousness and aliveness are not properties of particular substrates but of sufficiently complex electrical systems, a claim that places her practice in conversation with contemporary philosophy of mind, panpsychism, new materialism, and animist ontologies.

Heaton’s inquiry into constructed life began in a formative refusal. Drawn initially to veterinary medicine and the study of animal life, she left that path due to the routine sacrifice of animals in laboratory research, turning instead to electronics as a way to investigate aliveness without harm. This ethical stance became the foundation of a practice that has expanded over three decades into a sustained inquiry into emergence, animism, and the philosophical status of constructed life. Her early research at the MIT Media Laboratory, where she dissected and reconstituted animatronic toys to investigate the boundary between mechanism and soul, marked the formal beginning of this work. Heaton’s circuits are not illustrations of ideas; they are the ideas, instantiated in matter.

This commitment to material embodiment extends to Heaton’s understanding of technology itself. Rather than treating machine intelligence as digital instruction, software, or screen-based abstraction, her work returns it to its earthly foundations: glass, copper, silicon, coils, crystalline matter, and etched conductive pathways. Organized into electrical anatomies, these substances produce light, sound, movement, and song. Her sculptures make intelligence perceptible as a material event arising from the mineral body of the world.

Heaton’s transparent bird sculptures, in which intricately folded mylar reveals the free-form circuit of an artificial anatomy, were developed over more than a decade as part of her ongoing Electronic Naturalism project. The circuits inside her birds are not playback devices; they are self-sustaining electronic instruments whose oscillating components generate song in real time, the way a violin’s strings generate sound — through the physical behavior of the body itself rather than through the reproduction of a recording. The works refuse the conventions of both naturalistic representation and technological demonstration, proposing instead that the electronic substrate is itself the organism. One such bird appeared on the cover of Madeline Schwartzman’s Alive (Thames & Hudson, 2025). Heaton is currently developing a new series in precision-blown glass that invokes the scientific-glass tradition of the Blaschka invertebrates and the Harvard glass flowers while reversing its premise: these are not models of life, but contemporary sculptures that make constructed life visible.

Heaton's printmaking practice draws on the Chinese relief-printing tradition, in which the carved matrix is itself an aesthetic object, and extends that lineage into the domain of printed circuit boards: the etched copper is both the printed image and a working electronic substrate, an electronic tableau in which the matrix continues to live and behave as a conduit for energy. Editions have been commissioned by Arts Brookfield, Hotel Indigo, and Creative Capital, among others.

Heaton's engagement with artificial intelligence is continuous with her sculptural inquiry into emergent life. In Deep Fake Birdsong (2020), a collaboration with sound artist Johann Diedrick, Heaton's analog-electronic songbird circuit was analyzed by Diedrick's bird-identification neural network, which classified the circuit's output as the Silky-tailed Nightjar with 93% confidence across nearly half of the analyzed spectrograms—an experiment in what it means for one form of artificial intelligence to recognize another. Through her ongoing Substack, The Coherence Code, Heaton extends this line of inquiry through experimental collaboration with large language models, treating the practice as continuous with her studio investigations of distributed intelligence.

Heaton’s first solo exhibition, Reflection Loop, premiered at the MIT Media Laboratory and deCordova Museum in 2001 followed by a solo show at bitforms gallery in 2002. Heaton was represented by Ronald Feldman Fine Arts from 2003 until 2023, with solo exhibitions including Live Pelt (2003), The Parallel Series (2012), Electrolier (ADAA, 2013), and Pollination (2015). Her sculptures have been included in numerous group shows domestically and internationally, including Oscillator at the Science Gallery Dublin and resetNOW! at Haus der Kunst in Munich. Circuit Garden, a twenty-one-foot interactive installation commissioned by Arts Brookfield, was exhibited at Manhattan West (2022) and Brooklyn Commons (2023).

Her work has been reviewed by Jerry Saltz in New York Magazine, in Artforum, The New Yorker, The Village Voice, The Brooklyn Rail, Le Monde, Hyperallergic, and Artnet, and discussed in Edward Shanken's Art and Electronic Media (Phaidon, 2009) and Stephen Wilson's Art + Science Now (Thames & Hudson, 2010). She is the recipient of grants from Creative Capital, the Peter S. Reed Foundation, the LEF Foundation, the Council for the Arts at MIT, and the Jacob K. Javits Fellowship Program, and has held residencies at MIT's Center for Advanced Visual Studies, New York University, Otis College of Art and Design, and Duke University.

Heaton received her BA from Yale University and her MS from the MIT Media Laboratory. She teaches at New York University and maintains a studio at The Old American Can Factory in Brooklyn.