Chico MacMurtrie was born in New Mexico in 1961. He has been awarded four grants from the National Endowment for the Arts for Interdisciplinary Artists. In 1990 he received the San Francisco Bay Guardian Goldie Award.
In 1992 MacMurtrie formed Amorphic Robot Works, a group of artists and engineers working together to create robotic art performances and installations. His permanent commissioned interactive sculptures include the anthropomorphic Urge to Stand at Yerba Buena Gardens in San Francisco, Fetus to Man sculpture/clock for the city of Lille France, and Growing Raining Tree at Contemporary Arts Center in Cincinnati OH.
ARW's Artistic Director Chico MacMurtrie, describes his vision, "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.
Chico MacMurtrie belongs to the Amorphic Robot Works collective.
CHICO MacMURTRIE, a Brooklyn-based artist, has been building robots for nearly three decades. His creations do not vacuum the house, teach foreign languages to children or try to take over the world; they were designed to play music, mainly syncopated rhythms, and perhaps evoke some thought about humanity.
Most are abstract creatures, from knee high to larger than life size, controlled by a concert of computers, pneumatic actuators and small motors. Though they were all made for different installations around the world, the robots have in common a sort of whimsical darkness, born of the contrast between the brutality of their machinery and the innocence of their awkward movements. One robot, for example, plucks its own stringed body, while others hop around on the floor in a manner not unlike children playing leapfrog.
more on: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/13/arts/music/chico-macmurtries-robot-musicians-perform-in-brooklyn.html
Artist site: http://amorphicrobotworks.org/
vimeo: https://vimeo.com/chicomacmurtrie
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