Chico MacMurtrie / Amorphic Robot Works

 

Mountains Philboy, a Feisty Kid Electro Drummer Stringbody Stringbody performance Rude Boy and Stringbody Transparent Body Overconsumption Man Totempole

A portion of The Amorphic Landscape. Visible (from left to right) are the Tree with the drumming Mulabundas, Geck (hanging from the Tree branch), the xylophonic House and Rude Boy (in the background), Electro Drummer, Landscape Mountains, the Rope Climber, Feisty Children (in the aperture), and Transparent Body.
Photo: feistyworks

Tyko Drummer announces the arrival of life in an Amorphic Landscape performance.
Photo: feistyworks

The Amorphic Landscape: Narrative

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.