Chico MacMurtrie

Chico MacMurtrie was born in New Mexico in 1961 and currently resides in San Francisco. He holds a B.F.A. from the University of Arizona and an M.F.A. in New Forms and Concepts from the University of California at Los Angeles. MacMurtrie has been awarded four grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and has been Artist in Residence at San Francisco's Exploratorium and at the Chicago Art Institute.

In 1992 MacMurtrie formed Amorphic Robot Works, a San Francisco-based group of artists, engineers and technicians working together to create robotic performances and installations. He describes his vision as ARW’s Artistic Director: "The work is an ongoing endeavor to uncover the primacy of movement and sound. Each machine is inspired or influenced both by modern society and what I physically experience and sense. The whole of this input informs my ideas and work."

some works:

http://amorphicrobotworks.org/works/grt/index.htm

The Amorphic Landscape is a large-scale robotic installation and performance which has been developed, performed and exhibited by MacMurtrie and Amorphic Robot Works (ARW) since 2000.

Central to the 20-meter-long Amorphic Landscape is an organic environment engineered to provide both a physical and narrative structure for more than 100 individual robots. This environment, however, is more than a passive context for its robotic inhabitants, The Landscape is, itself, a robotic form capable of movement and transformation. One-hour theatrical performances of The Landscape depict the formation of the earth, the birth and rise of creatures and communication, the degradation of the environment, and the many intervening life cycles in which everything takes part.

In addition to its already innovative theatrical performances, The Amorphic Landscape has recently been adapted to run as an interactive exhibition by integrating computer vision technologies into the Landscape’s hardware and software.

pics are of Amorphic Landscape