Chico MacMurtrie

Image courtesy of the artist; photo by Andrew Boyle

Chico MacMurtrie marries traditions of soft sculpture and kinetic art, movements popularized concurrently in the 1960’s in reaction to expanding globalized electronic networks. He imbues the machine form with human sensibility, with “supple” gestures that emerge from empirical rationality. Through progressive developments in organic robotics, MacMurtrie arrives ultimately at a futurist technobody sensitive enough to approach. 

Responding to the receding boundary between the organic and the machine, MacMurtrie’s sculptures extend “webs of interconnected, inflatable members” ever further across the uncanny valley. Shared breath materially bridges the lungs of his machine and those of viewers, joining not the methods of communication between human and robot but their very lifeforce. In Tedlar fabric and microbial animation, MacMurtrie’s systems twist space into a cyborg architecture: a landscape of dynamic hybrid forms that interact with their environment, collectives of modular nodes whose lifelike realization is greater than the sum of its parts.

MacMurtrie's works has been presented in major museums and cultural institutions around the world, including the National Art Museum of China (NAMOC), Beijing; Hayward Gallery, London; Museo de la Reina Sofia, Madrid; Cité des Sciences et de l’Industrie, Paris; Museo Universitario de Arte Contemporaneo (MUAC), Mexico City; Pioneer Works, Brooklyn, NY; Shanghai Biennale; Muffatwerk, Munich (Pneuma World); Ex-Dogana, Rome, and ZHI Art Museum, Chengdu. Chico MacMurtrie is developing Dual Pneuma while in residency at the UCI Beall Center, an interactive inflatable sculpture intended for presentation in the 2024 Future Tense exhibition. His larger practice can be accessed here: http://amorphicrobotworks.org/.