hi, i'm yafira aka electrocute
I'm a design engineer and creative technologist in New York City. I recently graduated from NYU's Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP) with my master's degree, and I hold a B.S. in computer science from CUNY. I work across physical computing, embedded systems, e-textiles, and generative text — experimental interfaces where hardware, software, and material form meet.
I'm happiest somewhere between a soldering iron and a blinking cursor. I was a STEAM kid before the term existed — art and science never felt like separate rooms to me. Software is where I started, but lately hardware is where my curiosity runs deepest: laying out a circuit, coaxing a microcontroller into doing something it wasn't quite meant to do, then fabricating it a soft body to live in. I like the middle of the two. I gravitate toward slow, calm technology — I like to call it : electronics with the sensibility of a poem. I've always had a heightened sense for detail, for textures and colors and how things feel in your hands. I believe machines can be tender.
the lab
Electrocute Lab is my independent practice and the home of this site — and the name is a little spell. IRL I'm quiet, calm, sometimes shy. Electrocute is everything glowing underneath: the brighter frequency I broadcast on, the static finally finding its signal. The name has been with me since 2015, waiting like a seed — and over the past five years it bloomed into the work itself: soft circuits, playful hardware, generative text, and small open-source tools, where technology learns manners from craft.
Always learning — a new fabrication technique, an unfamiliar microcontroller — and most of what I make is shared publicly so others can learn from it, remix it, or build on it. I got here because people generously shared their work with me, and I intend to keep that cycle going.
the journey
The family computer is where it all began. Technically it belonged to everyone; practically it was mine. I was the kid who loved trains and tracks as much as Polly Pocket, the one who fixed whatever broke and taught herself HTML through Neopets pages and MySpace layouts while photos loaded line by line. Computers were the first thing I ever loved figuring out, and the tinkering never stopped.
The route from there was scenic — words first, then a few detours, until electrical engineering pulled me toward the hidden mechanics of how things work and one programming class settled it. I switched to computer science and stayed.
Along the way I got curious about the histories connecting textiles and computation, which eventually carried me to ITP. My thesis, The Soft Computer, is a textile computing object with felt keys, a machine-knit body, and a Markov chain that generates poetry on an e-ink display — an argument that softness and craft belong in the interface, not next to it.
the current
These days I'm building experimental electronics, interactive objects, tiny playful things, and web tools, and writing about the process as I go. Away from the screen: fiddling with my knitting machine, playing chess, experimenting in the kitchen, and finding joy in small, lovely things — beautiful stationery, a perfectly designed snack wrapper.
Aesthetically, I live in two worlds at once. In person I'm all black everything, goth romantic, drawn to brutalist edges — while my digital world is pastels and all things cute. ¿Por qué no los dos? The tension is the point: softness hits harder with something dark underneath.
I'm always open to collaborating — if you want to make something soft, strange, or quietly magical together, come say hi