“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. On 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.
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” that harbors the germ of the unassailable automobile’s biological aspirations. The Citroën becomes fertile ground, which this growing inflatable seed covertly consumes, coopts and subverts for its own needs—the thriving new 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. The form of the totem pole is narrative in nature. As the sculpture rises, multiple narratives unfold. In the collision, negotiation and compromises reached between the organic and the inorganic aspects of itself, narratives suggesting entropy, domination, transformation, mortality and the nature of strength are exposed.

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Chico MacMurtrie (US) is internationally known for his large-scale performative robotic installations. He has exhibited in 16 different countries and has received the support of many notable granting agencies. In 1987, he founded Amorphic Robot Works, a collaborative group of artists and engineers dedicated to the study and creation of movement.