Totem Pole Forest

A view of the two of the Forest's Totem Poles as installed in their premiere exhibition, commissioned by The Columbus Museum of Art and Design in Indiana.
Photo: ARW

The Forest of Telescoping Totem Poles is an interactive installation consisting of five inflatable totem poles that grow organically from a large central artery. The large dormant artery sculpted from rubber-coated rip stop nylon, flows through the entire installation, framing the five shriveled, upright forms.

Upon entering the installation, the visitors' movements though the Forest trigger the artery to push air into the Totems, causing them to tumesce with a pulsing rhythm. As the Totems rise, they reveal a plethora of rich imagery consisting of a collage of the human condition, merged with the organic shapes that come from plant life and the inner body.

Once the visitor is in the Forest among the Totem Poles and becomes involved in their dance of upward growth, the entire floor is activated by the strong pulsing of the artery. The Totems continue to climb and push towards the ceiling, struggling to reveal their hidden forms… perhaps their destinies… ultimately reaching beyond the ceiling.

By creating shapes and movements that are reminiscent of both plant life and human viscera, the Forest of Telescoping Totem Poles reminds viewers of the unity of the natural world: that which is within them and that in which they live.

Sixteen Birds

Sixteen Birds as installed in Adelaide, Australia's Experimental Art Foundation. Their configuration echos the flow of Australia's River Murray.
Photo: ARW

Sixteen Birds is the first multi-sculpture installation using Amorphic Robot Works' (ARW’s) new Inflatable Bodies technology. The work consists of 16 large, white fabric shapes that recall the simplest line drawing of a bird, hanging limp and lifeless from the ceiling at eye level.

As viewers enter the room, the tapered, joined cone-shapes gradually inflate with air, lengthen and take form, eventually reaching out with a graceful wingspan, robust with life. The Birds then begin their stationary journey with a slow, elegant flapping motion, all 16 in a randomly generated sequence. The pneumatic mechanism that animates the work creates a constant, rhythmic breathing sound.

Moving through the installation allows you to find various compositions reminiscent of natural formations: compositions that change over the life cycle of the work. As in other natural organizations, however, the viewers’ presence affects the work’s life cycle, putting pressure on the system that may prematurely end the lives of the creatures on exhibition.

The exhibit gives responsibility to each person entering. As more humans enter the space, the Birds begin to accumulate air, filling their bodies as if human presence gives them life. The open, physically accessible nature of the installation gives the impression that visitors are free to roam within the Birds’ space, but if the viewers encroach upon their space excessively, a death cycle is triggered. Once one Bird is infected, it begins to corrupt the others’ behaviors, and soon all the Birds have prematurely ended their life cycles. If, however, the audience manages to respect the Birds’ personal space, they will have an opportunity to witness the complete performance.

The shape of the installation as a whole can be varied in response to the venue, or the semantic or visual intent of the artist for a given show. The first installation of Sixteen Birds, for example, was patterned after the view of Adelaide, Australia from the air. The River Murray, renowned for its beautiful, curving shapes, is a river that is now dying because of the overdevelopment surrounding it. In the Adelaide installation, the robotic Birds are suspended from their control system in a contour that traced the shape drawn by the River Murray upon the earth, allowing the river to serve as metaphor for the foundation of the Birds’ lives.

Floating Tree

The Tree and its supporting platform planted with grasses native to the region.
Photo: ARW

A Tree for Anable Basin investigates and celebrates the enigmatic, rapidly changing waterfront environment of Long Island City. Launched as a site-specific installation in response to Long Island City in Context, an unorthodox urban guidebook published by Place in History, this public sculpture also coincides with the exhibition of Chico MacMurtrie's work at the Andrew Edlin Gallery in Chelsea. It is conceived as a temporary installation. It encapsulates in a single gesture the dynamism and split personality of a landscape undergoing tumultuous redevelopment.

As a natural object crafted from industrial materials, the floating aluminum tree evokes Anable Basin’s historical interplay between industrial and ecological activity. Anable Basin—a 500-ft-long notch in the East River—was carved from tidal wetlands in 1868 to serve as loading slip for oil tankers and other cargo ships. Between the demolition of the former Pepsi bottling plant in 2004 and the ongoing construction of deluxe high-rise residences on the site, the developers attempted a massive detoxification operation to clear generations of pollutants from the waterfront.

The site's natural regeneration began 30 years ago, however, with the Clean Water Act and the gradual return of migratory water birds. Neighborhood groups such as the LIC Community Boathouse have quietly begun to explore the potential of Anable Basin to contribute to the life of the waterfront and the city. A Tree for Anable Basin builds upon the resiliency and elusive beauty of the site. Floating upon a sculptural island planted with native estuary grasses and glowing with solar-powered lights, the Tree is designed to enhance the existing habitat for birds.

The sculpture's presence is intended to raise questions about community access and land use by inviting public spectacle at a traditionally restricted site. Although the privately-controlled Basin has long been concealed from public view, Tree identifies this tidal waterway as a cultural and ecological resource to be understood, enjoyed and preserved. Embodying the transitional quality of the present moment, Tree foreshadows and refracts the accelerating corporate promotion of the site through landscape amenities. Yet its textured metal branches and fishing-dock-inspired base express the lingering traces of an industrial past.

Set to premier before the New York City skyline on October 20, 2007, the sculpture will float through NYC’s waterways, a fixture in the foreground of the awesome and notoriously transitive cityscape.

More information on A Tree for Anable Basin can be found on this site following its progress.

Totemobile

Totemobile unfolding and revealing its insides while lifting its head lights.
Photo: Chico MacMurtrie

Totemobile is a robotic sculpture that initially appears as a life-sized representation of the culturally iconic 1965 Citroën DS automobile. In performance, this familiar figure is visually exploded, subverted and elaborated through various levels of abstraction until it reaches its final form: an organic 18-meter-tall totem pole. Upon reaching its full height, the work blooms with light, in the form of multiple organically-inspired inflatable sculptures suggesting the final maturation of an enormous biological organism. The work has just completed a three month exhibition in Citroën’s flagship showroom at 42 Champs-Élysées in Paris, where it enjoyed its world premiere in November 2007.

The Totemobile is powered by electric linear actuators controlled by an Allen-Bradley industrial control system. The machine is equipped with multiple emergency stops and four state-of-the-art industrial safety laser shields wired directly into the emergency stop system. This emergency system halts all machine movement, should a member of the audience get closer to the work than is safely advisable. Totemobile and its safety and control systems were Veritas inspected for public display in France.

The Allen-Bradley computer system keeps track of the machines’ every location by monitoring more than 100 sensors. These sensors assure each component follows a precise unfolding and regathering of all of the mechanical and sculptural elements in this 42-degree of freedom artwork during its five-and-a-half minute ascent and one-and-a-half minute descent.

The initial form of the robotic sculpture is deceptively simple, and belies the existence of nearly 50 interdependent machines of varying aesthetic and functional purpose. As the sculpture opens and rises, these metal and inflatable machines give voice to varying modes of mobile abstraction, which develop throughout the growth and final “blooming” of the full, 18-meter tall work.

As the familiar structure visually decomposes into its constituent geometric parts, each part becomes a more organic version of the original, and eventually lends its decomposing body to support the life of the new organism it harbors. This automobile’s point of natural transcendence lies in its inflatable airbags: in protecting and distancing its unforgiving synthetic body from us, the inflatable provides a point of direct contact with biological frailty. This point of contact provides the “crack”, which harbors the germ of the unassailable automobile’s biological aspirations. The Citroën becomes fertile ground, which this growing inflatable seed covertly consumes, co-opts and subverts for its own needs – the new thriving body yielding where required to insure the viability of its new-found skeleton, the comfortable and utilitarian form of the Citroën DS leaving its pedestrian servitude and stretching to achieve the organic beauty and flexibility more subtly suggested in its original architecture.

Inflatable Architecture

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.

Boas Vindas!

Bem vindos ao Blog PROJETO KMA!

Este Blog é destinado ao Projeto Interdisciplinar da Universidade Anhembi Morumbi, do curso Design Digital.

O PROJETO KMA iniciou-se pela escolha do artista contemporâneo Chico MacMurtrie, através do estudo de design, arte e tecnologia correlacionados, para conceituar o desenvolvimento de um website autoral, de caráter experimental por meio de uma interface gráfica diferenciada e elementos da hipermídia.

Comentaremos ao decorrer do semestre as obras de Chico MacMurtrie, as etapas de nossa pesquisas e a criação de nosso website experimental.

Projeto

Depois do levantamento bibliográfico feito pelo grupo, decidimos debater qual seria a delimitação de nosso projeto.
Inúmeras questões foram levantadas, tais como:
A crítica a dependência do homem a máquina, A interação homem/máquina e a Simulação da vida.
Decidimos analisar todos os assuntos para então estipularmos qual assunto conceituava as obras de Chico Macmurtrie da maneira mais coerente.
Optamos a princípio estudar como Chico Maccurtrie usava o conceito de Simulação da vida em suas obras, porém, ao comparar o tempo que tínhamos para pesquisa e o quão abrangente era este assunto, chegamos a conclusão de que não haveria tempo suficiente para o explorarmos.
Decidimos então por estudar o conceito de Autopoiese, um dos assuntos levantados, utilizado por ele em suas obras.

A maioria de nossas informações foram extraídas do site amorphicrobotworks.org