Becky Heritage, Assistant Bookstore Manager

becky@eyebeam.org

Making things, sharing new discoveries, and helping people are traits and interests that have been the impetus behind my artistic explorations, academic endeavors, and professional career. I’m always looking for the next thing to make, hack, or learn. The most significant personal and artistic development for me was when I decided to introduce interactive technologies as medium into my practice. I felt a strong responsibility to determine my role in the landscape of social innovation; so I geared my interests towards pedagogical research and exploration. This lead me to work across a spectrum of educational settings: murals workshops with New York graffiti artists such as Younity collective, Alice Mizrachi, Lady Pink, and Lucha; teaching hardware/software courses focusing on Python, Processing, and Arduino to MFA and BFA students at Parsons School of Art, Media, and Technology; offering soft circuitry workshops in New York City public schools with Community Works NYC; solar cooking workshops at Socrates Sculpture Park; and game design and soft circuit workshops for adolescents with Autism Spectrum Disorder with the All Kinds of Minds Institute, at PACE University’s Seidenberg School of Computer Science, and the Jewish Community Center in Manhattan. I am currently pursuing my second Masters, M.S. Ed in Special Education (9-12), and I am researching systems-thinking and technology-based art forms as a platform for integrated curriculum.

The conceptual domains of my work encompass subcultures, drawing machines, and feedback loops. The mediums include hardware/software setups, drawings, and soft circuitry. Some recent work have been illustrations with game collective Local No. 12, Metagame a card game about video games, and soft circuitry consultation and fabrication with fashion designer Norma Kamali.