Chico MacMurtrie: Amorphic Robot Works

Chico MacMurtrie (sic): Amorphic Robot Works. Pneuma World, The Robotic Church. Installations. Illustrated and discussed on MacMurtrie's website, as of October 2024, here.[1]

Pneuma World

For the last 30 years, Chico MacMurtrie has created metaphors with machines exploring the intersection of robotic sculpture, new media installation and performance. His recent work, developed and produced with his interdisciplinary collective Amorphic Robot Works (ARW), comprises light-weight “soft” machines activated by air pressure. This exhibition highlights a selection of works from MacMurtrie’s “Inflatable Architectural Bodies” series from 2004 through the present.

These servo-pneumatic sculptures, consisting of interconnected chambers of high tensile composite fabric, offer an alternative vision of robotic sentience — one in which the machine appears vulnerable and ephemeral as it transforms through a sequence of motions. The soft machines strive to achieve simple gestures or actions, as if searching for basic dignity or a sign of their existence. In some cases, during the span of a performance, they relapse or degenerate into embryonic lumps of matter, and then undergo the vital ordeal of rebirth.[2]

The Robotic Church

The Robotic Church is a site-specific installation and performance series comprising 50 computer-controlled pneumatic sculptures. Created between 1987 and 2006 and installed in ARW’s studio, a former Norwegian Seamen’s Church in, Brooklyn, New York, these machines mesmerize with their percussive sounds and gestures. They express themselves through rhythm and body language, ranging from introspective solos to powerful ensembles erupting from different corners of the space. [...]. Their syncopated outbursts of call-and-response evoke the origin of communication.

This collection of animated machines, formerly known as the “Ancestral Path,” traces the evolution of MacMurtrie’s first robotic sculptures from the late ‘80s, from works such as “Tumbling Man” and “Drumming and Drawing Subhuman” to later ones possessed of more kinetic abilities and refined movements such as “Urge to Stand” and “Transparent Body.” They all are part of MacMurtrie’s/ARW’s “Society of Machines,” a body of work comprising over 250 individual sculptures, which have performed in different configurations in Europe and in smaller formats also throughout the United States, Latin America, and Asia.[3]

Cf. and definitely contrast the Church of Robotology in Futurama.[4][5]

RDE, finishing, with thanks to Patrick Licht and Lisa Yaszek, 23Oct24