Dual Pneuma, 2024

Dual Pneuma is a soft-robotic performer evoking a humanoid body. Composed of inflatable, high-tensile fabric muscles, the artwork is capable of assuming a wide range of human, animal, and insect-like positions. The robot’s movement is directed by feedback loops between bend sensors in its joints and pressure sensors in its feet, which allow it to respond in real-time to the complexity of live scenarios. Alongside the robots is a series of ceramic works cast directly from the robotic figure. Compressed air is channeled through the ceramic sculptures to produce whistling sounds, which reference the water and wind-based huaco instruments of early Mesoamerican cultures.

→ Behind the Science

The Dual Pneuma project explores how living creatures maintain balance and evolve their movements. It builds on MacMurtrie’s earlier work with “soft machines,” which are inflatable robots designed to mimic natural movements. The project combines traditional programming and robotics with more user-friendly control systems. The project is additionally informed by MacMurtrie’s exploration of fluid creatures that merge across the US-Mexico border. Its hybrid form speaks to Gloria Anzaldúa’s understanding of the mestiza object, or spiritual crossbreed, speculating beyond binaristic border politics and criticizing larger systems of technology and power.

“The machine transitions between states of crawling and walking. When it seems to be falling over, it transitions into a different posture. It has this morphing ability to go from one thing to the next.” —Chico McMurtrie

Since the late 1980s, Chico MacMurtrie has explored the intersection of robotic sculpture, new media installation, and performance. His work investigates organic life from deep within, finding geometry in all living systems. MacMurtrie and his interdisciplinary collective, Amorphic Robot Works/ARW, have received numerous awards for their experimental new media artworks and have been presented in major museums and cultural institutions around the world.

→ Conversation: Chico MacMurtrie

Landscape Allegories, 2004

Julie Mehretu is known for her meticulously layered gestural paintings, often thought to visualize the architecture of modern systems. As in her paintings, Mehretu’s Landscape Allegories etchings employ multiple techniques to produce images which are dually abstract and representational. The plates suggest images of wind turbulence and other weather phenomena intersecting with the ghostly scaffolding of human infrastructure. Tension is evident between the rigidity of architecture and an unruly “nature.” Landscape Allegories was produced during the same year as Mehretu’s widely known Stadia II painting, suggestive of the artist’s timely interest in systems of power and their widespread effects.

Julie Mehretu is an Ethiopian-American artist who lives and works in New York City. She has been at the forefront of contemporary art for nearly three decades exploring subjects of history, the phenomenology of the social, and the psychogeography of space. In her large-scale landscapes and abstractions, Mehretu builds up layers of acrylic paint along with photographs, media images, architectural plans, and maps. These reference points are transposed onto her canvases to depict the cumulative effect of urban histories and socio-political changes. Within this unique visual vocabulary, she captures the dynamism of contemporary experiences and various systems in her work.

Logic Paralyzes the Heart, 2022

Hershman Leeson’s Logic Paralyzes the Heart follows a cyborg (played by actor/filmmaker Joan Chen) who has just turned sixty-one. Her birth year, 1960, is when the term “cyborg” was coined to describe the human enhancements that enable extraterrestrial survival and travel. In this film, the cyborg details the history of cyborgian technology, from its early intention as a tool for human liberation to the ways in which this technology has produced a break between ethical human advancement and exploitation. She ultimately meets her human avatar, and the pair meditate on the current troubled relationship between humans and their world, the climate and extinction crises, and the potential for future evolution and change. The artist asks, how can we transform weapons into tools of survival?

Lynn Hershman Leeson is internationally acclaimed for her art and films and is recognized for innovative work that investigates issues including identity, surveillance and the use of media as a tool of empowerment against censorship and political repression. Her practice includes producing one of the first interactive video art discs, an artificially intelligent web agent and coding her work into DNA. Awards include: Siggraph Lifetime Achievement Award, John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship and Honorary Doctorate from Pratt. Her work is in The Museum of Modern Art, The Whitney Museum of American Art, and The Tate Modern and other private and public collections.

Huitztlampa, 2023

Huitztlampa, a mechatronic installation of everyday objects, is computer programmed to move in response to live weather signals from Los Angeles. Palma Rodríguez lives in a Nahua agricultural region outside Mexico City and wants his work to provide a heightened sense of urgency about both climate change and labor issues. In the pre-Hispanic Nahuatl creation story, four cardinal points are each associated with a deity: Huitztlampa, the south, is embodied by a hummingbird and the sun in the blue winter sky. This title and the objects (ladder, boots) also reference migrant workers, who must float like hummingbirds and move with the sun.

Fernando Palma Rodríguez (Mexican, b. 1957) combines his training as both an artist and an industrial engineer to create robotic sculptures that utilize custom software to perform complex, narrative choreographies. He lives and works in the agricultural region of Milpa Alta outside Mexico City, where he runs Calpulli Tecalco, a non-profit organization dedicated to the preservation of Nahua language and culture. His practice is focused on indigenous ancestral knowledge as part of contemporary life and as a way of shaping the future as he responds to issues facing his community, such as human and land rights, violence, and urgent environmental crises.

Circle of Infinite Chaos, 2022

In 2022, following the COVID-19 pandemic, painter Clare Rojas made a series of paintings about “the edge” of environmental collapse, of political disarray, and of the anxiety produced by both. This included Circle of Infinite Chaos, depicting a woman lying beneath a sphere with intersecting loops and floating objects. Perhaps it is a metaphor for synapses firing in Rojas’s brain as she tries to make sense of chaos? As she notes: “I think my work has always teetered between chaos and the opposite of chaos. Serenity, maybe…I’ve always been searching for that balance, and the magic is somewhere in the middle.”

Clare Rojas is known for paintings with idiosyncratic personal narratives and abstractions. After relocating to San Francisco, she became associated with the Mission School in the 1990s, which drew heavily from narrative and folk art forms. Her flat, geometric style often references a quest for harmony among universal elements and represents relationships between humans and nature. Many of her paintings are seen to reference cycles of life between birth, death, and re-birth.