August insects /  by kelly heaton

Landscape painting and analog electronic soundscape (detail of work in-progress). August 2018

Landscape painting and analog electronic soundscape (detail of work in-progress). August 2018

I create the sound of a buzzy August insect using a 555 timer to drive a transistor astable multivibrator (to give timbre). Another slow astable multivibrator provides pulse input to a 555 timer in monostable configuration, that gives a pulse out to the base resistor of an astable multivibrator that sets the tempo. That's why the insect rattles for awhile and then stops (monostable 555 goes high - the rattle tempo is active low).

Prototyping Night Insects /  by kelly heaton

Here I am at my bench prototyping various analog electronic insects for my latest "electrolier" sculpture. The sounds are made using a combination of astable multivibrators (oscillators), some of which create the audio timber and others establish a chirp-like tempo. The speakers are custom piezo electric devices that I have physically modified to achieve different sound qualities, such as brighter versus muffled and close versus distant. Individuality is achieved by subtle variations in the electrical signal and the output device.

Modeling tree branches /  by kelly heaton

Using Blender to model and Pepakura to produce paper patterns for tree branches.

Trump and Putin /  by kelly heaton

With the news blowing up about election interference, I can't resist reposting these paintings from last year: "Donald Trump (The Big Hack)" and "Vladimir Putin (The Operational Amplifier)." Politics, technology, gobbledygook, obfuscation, and sneakiness. Oil on canvas, 2017

Reprise 2018 /  by kelly heaton

Several of my works from Pollination (2015) are on view in New York this summer. Details and press release follow:

Reprise: Summer Show 2018
Ronald Feldman Gallery
Jun 12 – Aug 31, 2018

Scene from the gallery showing three of my works from Pollination (2015): Weeds, C, and Shamanic Bee

Scene from the gallery showing three of my works from Pollination (2015): Weeds, C, and Shamanic Bee

Piezo speaker housing /  by kelly heaton

Here's a prototype of a housing for a piezo speaker that I will actuate with analog electronic insect sounds. The shape of the housing and mechanical pressure on the piezo element will change the pitch as well as the volume. I made this housing by first laser cutting 1/4" acrylic and gluing the stacked rings to make a pyramidal-shaped buck — see images below. Note that there's a central hole all the way through the buck to aid the vacuum forming process. I’ve vacuum-formed .080” and .090" acrylic sheet over the buck (both work fine) and used a laser to cut the shapes out. My registration needs improvement, but you get the idea. The piezo element is mounted inside of the housing by a short length of plastic tube that I glued in place.

Below I show my process to cast the acrylic buck in plaster (using an alginate mold). I will use plaster, wood, or metal bucks in the future because acrylic deforms in the vacuum forming process. In either case, it is critical to use mold release.

Why am I doing this? Because when RadioShack went out of business, I could no longer buy the piezo speakers that I used for my insect sounds. I was forced to reverse engineer the part --which turned out to be a blessing because the sound of insects is heavily dependent upon the mechanics of speaker design (not just the electronics which drive the speaker). For a previous blog entry on this issue, link here or read about my project “Hacking Nature’s Musicians” on Hackaday.io

Chicken slaughter /  by kelly heaton

Yesterday, fifteen of our chickens were slaughtered while I was away. I found piles of feathers all through the fields and two dead bodies but the rest were gone. A pack of coyotes must have attacked around the same time that an intense thunderstorm…

Yesterday, fifteen of our chickens were slaughtered while I was away. I found piles of feathers all through the fields and two dead bodies but the rest were gone. A pack of coyotes must have attacked around the same time that an intense thunderstorm left things looking like a demon ripped through. Something turned the water in my fountain freakishly red. I found a few survivors, wet as rats, babbling anxiously as they wandered the fence line. Young chickens are so bright, curious and love to explore - it’s sad to see them lose their innocence to the inevitable predatory attack.

Pretty computer accidents /  by kelly heaton

Pretty computer accidents. I continue to work on a labor-intensive sculpture (electrolier). This video is tangentially related, insofar as I've discovered some cool visuals along the way. It would take me a long time to explain the sequence of computer accidents that created this landscape. Suffice it to say that the cloud and the mountainous earth are two different spatial interpretations of the same object, which in engineering terms means that the algorithm was an explosive failure. "Pretty is as pretty does" is not true in this case.