Biography + CV
Patrick Clancy is an artist, writer, curator, and researcher whose work explores conceptual and material aspects of dynamic energy systems. Through strategies that binteract with and document mediations between nature and culture, his actions and projects involve generative processes related to art, technology and the complex communities of natural, social and media ecologies.
Clancy's writings combine theory and storytelling and address topics of materialism and poetics, technology and culture, system theory, visualization and areas of convergence within contemporary art and science. Selected essays include: "Telefigures and Cyberspace" in Rethinking Technologies, University of Minnesota Press (1993); "The Role of the Artist in the Age of Autopoietic Simulation" in FutureFusion: Application Realities for the Virtual Age, International Society on Virtual Systems and Multimedia, Gifu, Japan (1998); and "Notes on the Science of Alchemy and the Engendering of Simulacra," in Growing Things: New Media Institute, The Banff Centre for the Arts, Alberta, Canada (2000); and “The Future of Computing in Organic Information Ecologies”.
Clancy co-founded Pulsa, a collaborative group of artists that pioneered early electronic and interactive computer-art through viewer-activated light and sound installations in the mid-1960's and early 1970's. This work included large-scale environmental-art and sentient spaces incorporating light, sound, infrared, and Doppler radar wave energies. In 1968, Pulsa developed the first voltage-controlled hybrid digital and analogue audio synthesizer.
Clancy is the recipient of grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Creative Capital Foundation, New York State Council on the Arts and the Missouri Arts Council. He participates in international symposia that explore creative and critical issues related to emerging technologies and their applications in world culture. He was a fellow at the Rockefeller Foundation's Study and Conference Center in Bellagio, Italy during the summer of 2001.
Clancy is Professor and Chair of the Photography, New Media and Printmaking Departments at Kansas City Art Institute. He is co-curator with Gwen Widmer of ELECTROMEDIASCOPE, an international survey of contemporary, experimental work in independent film, video, new media, and performance at The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City, Missouri.