Kelly Heaton

What an honor to have my art featured on cover of Madeline Schwartzman’s latest book, “Alive” (Thames&Hudson). My analog electronic songbirds are one of the peak achievements in my artist-scientist journey. After many years of studying hardware design (often alone and without a background in synthesizers), I managed to translate my animist philosophy into simple circuits that sound remarkably life-like thanks to the common geometry of waveforms. “Simple” does not mean easy; it took many years for me to discover the elegance by which oscillators shape electricity into sonic sculpture. The liminal space between slightly asynchronous waves leads to fascinating emergent behaviors, comparable to the three-body problem of physics. William Gray Walter explored this magic with his tortoises, now in the permanent collection of , and Mark Tilden pioneered the bicore circuit for embodied robotics. I refer to my own practice of making life-like circuits “electronic naturalism,” in which I aim to reveal the foundations of AI and, I would argue, the basis of all consciousness.

We have discovered a hidden geometry in light:
ν ∝ α^γ → log10 ν = χ + βγ (β ≈ log10 α).
Which leads to a provocative synthesis:
E = mc² + hν_min.
“Recursive Geometry of Atomic Spectra”
Preprint available on Zenodo:
https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.17167687