Amorphic Robot Works was formed in 1992. ARW is a New York based group of artists, engineers and technicians working together to create robotic performances and installations. ARW's Artistic Director Chico MacMurtrie, describes his vision, "The work is an ongoing endeavor to uncover the primacy of movement and sound. Each machine is inspired or influenced, both, by modern society, and what I physically experience and sense. The whole of this input informs my ideas and work."

Mark Ruch elaborates that "as there is a beauty and elegance in movement itself, there is equally potent an experience in watching a machine (human or organic in form), struggling to stand, attempting to throw a rock, or playing a drum. These primal activities, when executed by machines, evoke a deep and sometimes emotional reaction. It is the universality of emotional experience which intrigues us, and it is the contrapuntal use of machinery as artistic medium and organic movement as form which, perhaps ironically, combine to provoke these emotional reactions most readily."

The Amorphic Society includes more than 100 interactive and computer-controlled human and abstract machines ranging in size from 12 inches high to 30 feet long (Too Big Dog Monkey, pictured.)

Three kinetic sculpture commissions are on public display. In San Francisco, visit URGE, the only permanent interactive kinetic sculpture in the Yerba Buena Gardens, located on the corner of 4th Street and Howard Street. In Lille, France, visit Fœtus To Man a permanent kinetic figurative clock sculpture. In Cincinnati, see the Growing Raining Tree interactive kinetic sculpture, installed until 2006 at the Contemporary Arts Center.

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