NIGHTJAR
by Kelly Heaton
Kelly Heaton
Kelly Heaton is an artist who combines visual art, electrical engineering, and ethical witchcraft. She invented a practice called “electronic naturalism” to study electricity in biological organisms as well as machines. Her aesthetic circuits are life-like (aka electrified) depictions of natural and spiritual themes. Her career as a professional artist spans more than twenty years since her graduation from the MIT Media Laboratory in 2000.
Contact info
Email: kbheaton [at] gmail [dot] com
Nightjar uses simple analog electronics to make sounds that are remarkably bird like.
The circuit is completely analog and there’s no recorded sound, only six oscillators coupled together with passive filters. By adjusting the potentiometers, different patterns of “birdsong” can be generated.
The name “Nightjar” has an interesting backstory. In 2020, Heaton collaborated with Johann Diedrick on a project called Deep Fake Birdsong. They used Diedrick’s artificially intelligent software, Flights of Fancy, to analyze one of Heaton’s original songbird circuits. They discovered that 47 of the 122 analyzed spectrograms were matched with Antrostomus sericocaudatus (aka the Silky-tailed nightjar) with an average percent confidence match rating of 93%... and so the name stuck!
Manufacturer: Adafruit
Description: https://www.adafruit.com/product/5654
