jihui presents Chico MacMurtrie & Adrianne Wortzel, Wed. May 5, 7 PM

jihui - Digital Salon presents Chico MacMurtrie & Adrianne Wortzel
Wednesday, May 5, 2004, 7 - 9 PM
Parsons Design Lab
55 West 13th Street, 9th Fl.
New York, NY 10011
http://agent.netart-init.org

"Robot Works"

Chico MacMurtrie, Artistic Director of Amorphic Robot Works (ARW; http://www.amorphicrobotworks.org), will present work from his recent retrospective exhibition of over 100 machines, recently shown at this year's European Cultural Capital exhibition in Lille, France. This exhibition included the large-scale Robotic Landscape, Cave of the Subconscious, Too Big Dog Monkey, Floaters, and Skeletal Reflections. MacMurtrie and ARW have toured around the world realizing this society of machines in various performance and installation formats., MacMurtrie will discuss the evolution of his work, recent projects, and the use of vision technology to create ongoing interactive performance in an installation setting.

Adrianne Wortzel will show and tell StudioBlue, the telerobotic theater she developed and directs at the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art, as well as her current work-in-progress there: Eliza Redux, a theatrical scenario in the form of psychoanalytic sessions. The sessions unfold via real-time streaming of a physical robot equipped with an interactive conversational computer program in the tradition of Eliza. Patients visiting the web site will control the robot's motion, and video camera pan, tilt, and zoom in real time. Transcripts of sessions will be archived for future examination. Ms. Wortzel will be joined by James Cruickshanks, a graduate student at Cooper Union whose thesis project was the development of GRASP, a performance control software. Graduate students in Professor Zhang Ga's Collaboration Studio class at Parsons created the web interface for this project.


Chico MacMurtrie was born in New Mexico in 1961, and currently resides in New York. He received his 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. He has been awarded four grants from the National Endowment for the Arts for Interdisciplinary Artists (individual grants in 1988, 1990 and 1991; a collaborative grant in 1993 for the premiere of Trigram: A Robotic Opera, which was staged at Theatre Artaud in San Francisco). Trigram was a feature story on The Next Step program on the Discovery Channel. He was a Performing Artist in Residence at the Exploratorium in San Francisco in 1989, and in 1990 received the San Francisco Bay Guardian Goldie Award. In 1991, MacMurtrie completed a month long tour of Europe, funded by an Arts International grant. During that time he traveled and performed in Czechoslovakia and presented an award winning performance at the Ars Electronica Festival in Linz, Austria, which appeared on television in Munich, Berlin, and Dortmund, Germany. The tour ended with performances in Amsterdam and an interactive installation at the Kijkhuis, in Den Haag, Holland. A retrospective exhibition of over 100 machines was shown at the 2004 European Cultural Capital exhibition in Lille, France

Adrianne Wortzel's work explores historical and cultural perspectives through new technologies. She creates fictive webworks, and interactive robotic and telerobotic theatrical scenarios in both physical and virtual networked environments. Works include Eliza Redux, a robot offering interactive online psychoanalytic sessions; Camouflage Town, a telerobotic installation exhibited in Data Dynamics at The Whitney Museum of American Art (Spring 2001); Sayonara Diorama (1998), intermingling human and robotic actors who tell the tale of a fictive second Voyage of the Beagle by Charles Darwin thirty years after the first; The Ship's Detective, in Cooper Union's Technoseduction exhibition (1997); The Hidden Archivists at the Anchorage at Creative Time's Art in the Anchorage (1997); NoMad is An Island at Ars Electronica97 (Linz, Austria); and Tableaux Vivant Dan Une Monde Parfait in Areale 99 (Baitz, Germany). Her work is documented at http://artnetweb.com/wortzel. As a recipient of the Artists-in-Labs-Award, she will be an Artist-in-Residence at the University of Zurich Artificial Intelligence Lab from July through December 2004. Wortzel is a Professor of Communication Design at New York City College of Technology, CUNY; an instructor in the Instructional Technology Certificate Program of the CUNY Graduate Center; and an Adjunct Professor of Mechanical Engineering at the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art where she is also the Director of StudioBlue, an arena for telerobotic performance productions.

jihui (the meeting point), a self-regulated digital salon, invites all interested people to send ideas for discussion/performance/etc.
jihui is where your voice is heard and your vision shared.
jihui is made possible through the generous support from the Digital Design Department and Parsons Design Lab of the Parsons School of Design and from the Rockefeller Foundation
A joint public program by NETART INITIATIVE and INTELLIGENT AGENT