As a student at the Rhode Island School of Design, Alan Powell, aged nineteen, was given a key to the equipment room and spent six weeks in there playing with, studying and deconstructing the trove of sound and video equipment. The result was Heartbeat, an experimental video feedback art piece processed through a Sony SEG-1 video switcher with a Sony camera adapter in horizontal sync. Powell also created the sound loops: gathering sounds from his immediate surroundings which he would then feed through equipment he had taken apart until he had a sound construction that would serve as a aural counterpart to the illustrative video landscape. Those dissonant sounds and atonal music found in Heartbeat as well as many other of his video pieces, appeal to Powell because of his dyslexia: though written language and communication is a challenge, dyslexic brains are known to exhibit unique auditory processing skills and connections to non-linguistic forms of sound. Heartbeat was first shown in June 1972, during the Video Art Festival at The Kitchen in New York City. The original tape no longer exists.