Pratt Institute

Personal URL

Education

M.F.A., University of Oregon

Biography

Peter Frank Patchen is a digital artist exhibiting and lecturing nationally and internationally. He grew up in Colorado where the natural environment had a profound influence on his perception of the relationships that exist between nature, humanity, culture and technology.

In 1993, he founded the Cyber Arts (now New Media) program at the University of Toledo.

Recent work includes interactive artworks, prints, web-based art and mixed media pieces.
Extended Biography

Much of my work is about time. I am curious about the ways in which we mark and catalog our observations as memories or “facts” and guess at our futures. I relate history and tell stories. I reveal facts and I lie. But most of all, whether I’m working in interactive media or print, I’m sharing the complexity of a significant moment.

About my use of technology: I believe that, for humans, technology and nature are one and the same. Millions of years ago, a proto-human struck a stone against another to fashion a tool. With a loud thwack, that hominid forever fused our physical, cultural and technical evolutions. As a tool-making species, our technology is a natural for us as a nest is for a bird.

For me, the wonderful thing about the computer as an art medium is the freedom to move with relative ease between the different visual vocabularies of many diverse media within a single work. This allows me to be a potter, woodworker, photographer, draughtsman, computer technician, inventor, writer, archeologist, historian and, most of all, a thinker.