The Poetics of Possibility

A Decade with Patrick Shearn and Poetic Kinetics

By Marnie Sehayek, Strategy Director, Poetic Kinetics

It’s 2019, and the chill in the Berlin air feels sharper on the boom lift platform 144 feet above the city. Patrick Shearn– artist, madman, my boss, and friend– and I are standing at the maximum telescoped height of the machine, just above the Brandenburg Gate. Thirty years earlier, the Berlin Wall stood where we are now, but today, we’ve just finished installing the artist’s 24,000-squarefoot aerial canopy, Visions in Motion, commemorating the anniversary of the wall’s dismantling.

Beneath our feet, this artwork reflects a painful history while serving as a triumphant, peaceful bridge to the future. We laughed and exhaled deeply, savoring a moment of pause amid an otherwise hectic week of installation, meeting dignitaries, press interviews, and working with the State to gather 40,000 messages of hope, peace, and unity from the public to include in the artwork. Made of hundreds of thousands of strips of kite fabric, the installation from the artist’s groundbreaking Skynet Series billowed and wrinkled in the wind like a vast, recurring wave. In quiet moments, visitors could read the words of their peers, from ages five to 85, about what they wished for the world. The overall effect was an artwork that served as an open letter of care, optimism, urgency, and unity. We paused to appreciate just how far we had come. It was a conversation we both keep returning to, the kind that keeps the fire alive in our work to this day.

The Skynet Series

The Skynet Series premiered with Liquid Shard in Los Angeles (2016), which notably transformed an overlooked downtown city park into a vibrant destination where communities gathered, children played, and visitors watched in awe. “We went in guerrilla style and installed it in one night,” Patrick reflects. “The mayor’s phone was ringing off the hook about it.” Rightly so, over its two-week display, approximately 80,000 visitors came to the park, not to mention the tens of millions of views the artwork received online. Patrick continues, “There was no plaque or clear attribution, and people sincerely wondered how such a thing was possible.” Inconspicuously rigged, the artwork appeared to levitate in midair. With the viral surge into public consciousness, I joined the Poetic Kinetics team to help seize the moment. To date, we’ve exhibited over two dozen of these site-specific artworks worldwide.

A Naturalist, Machine Punk, Survivalist, and Artist

A play-by-play account of Patrick’s life reads like the highlight reel of several different people. As I’ve gotten to know him over the past eight years of working together, it’s become clear how these experiences have shaped his artistic practice and character. He was a nature-loving kid who grew up catching tadpoles and building things with his hands from an early age, thanks to creative, outside-the-box parents in the Black Forest of Colorado. His mother is a prolific maker herself and was the head of the Art Department at Pikes Peak Community College for decades. Playtime was a tangible experience. Build a miniature boat from scratch using scrap wood and scroll saws in the garage—then race them in the pond. In high school, Patrick spent summers as a sea kayaking guide in Baja, where he first came into contact with nature on a monumental scale, swimming with sea lions and following gray whale migrations. After mule packing in the Baja Sierras and guiding rafts on the Colorado River in the Grand Canyon, he spent his twenties working seasonally in Alaska on commercial construction crews, gaining skills with heavy equipment. He also took on commercial fishing gigs and camped in the woods to avoid rent. Later, he moved to New York City to attend film school, where he immersed himself in practical effects and creature making. Just before graduating, he headed to Los Angeles, where he built animatronics and puppeteered with Stan Winston Studios on Jurassic Park (if you look closely, his hand unintentionally makes the final cut) and created the fire effects in Interview with the Vampire.

“I picked up a sense of having no fear and really learned what a human being is capable of,” Patrick says. In nature, he found no shortage of revelation: “If you pay attention, there are so many little moments. You can stop and watch a whirlpool on the edge of a river. I began finding inspiration in details like that and felt driven to recreate the visceral feeling you have inside when you, for instance, look at an amazing sunset.”

“My work seeks to transport people to a ‘child state’ where there is an innocent, expansive feeling of possibility, wonder, and joy.”

In 1999, Patrick attended Burning Man for the first time, marking the beginning of a 25-year tenure at the festival. His first art installations at the festival in the early 2000s shattered the skyline with giant roving tributes to various flora. The Hope Flower and Venus Flytrap sculptures were girded by boom lifts, which earned him an invitation to fabricate, direct, produce, and perform a giant puppet show for the 2008 Beijing Olympics, collaborating with the Beijing Contemporary Dance Company. To take the job, he co-founded Poetic Kinetics, and the team produced 30-foot fully animated puppets controlled by cranes and forklifts.

For the better part of two decades, Poetic Kinetics has set a benchmark for interactive festival art, with larger-than-life roving figures exhibited at Burning Man, Electric Daisy Carnival, and the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival, where the studio remains a fan favorite. With each installation seeking to top the last, pushing the envelope became something of a bread-and-butter operation.

Poetic Kinetics: Studio as Laboratory

With Poetic Kinetics, Shearn has built a studio that treats every project as an experiment in motion, collaboration, and audience engagement. From giant puppets and immersive projections to festival-scale pyrotechnics to artisanal museum installations and kinetic public installations, the studio leverages technology and craftsmanship to create experiences that linger long after a viewer has walked away.

Whether through scale, motion, optical illusion, or more profound meaning, there’s an invitation in this work. Step out of passive consumerism. Experience your senses. Play.

A Philosophy of Life

Back to the boom lift in Berlin. That evening, standing 144 feet above the Brandenburg Gate with our most high-profile installation to date stretching beneath us, I tried to add some levity to the moment. “So, Patrick, how does it feel to be on top of the world?” I asked, half-joking. The artwork was a stunning success, drawing over a million visitors in seven days, making front-page headlines in several newspapers, and serving as the centerpiece of an international broadcast event featuring Nobel laureates and cultural and political leaders.

“You know, the art is almost a byproduct,” he said smiling. “Creating moments like this is why we do what we do.” His words stayed with me. Not only is the art merely an artifact of a life well lived, but beyond that, the Poetic Kinetics ethos is to, above all else, create, facilitate, and cultivate awe-inspiring experiences among us. The kind that makes you wonder, “How is this possible?”, and then expands your entire sense of possibility. We both find ourselves reflecting on this conversation often. In this moment of pause, we touched on an essential guiding principle for our collective.

The craft lies in the approach: in the rigorous, collaborative process, and in the intentional moments of connection we create, whether between two friends on a tiny platform in the sky or among thousands of strangers beneath a soaring sculpture that seems to breathe with the wind. Patrick’s character, both as an artist and as a person, is rooted in this core idea. Beyond producing spectacle, his greatest contribution is making space for authentic human experience. It’s not about what we make, but rather what we make possible.

After all is said and done, that is the art.