NEW YORK – ”WE found a great junkyard,” cheers Chico MacMurtrie. “This is, like, a score.”

The Brooklyn artist is on a hunt for tube-stock aluminum at J.P. Salvage Inc. in Staten Island, an important first step in creating his beguiling “interactive robotic performance art.”

MacMurtrie, a serial winner of National Endowment for the Arts grants, does not consider his creations toys – or stamping-plant automatons. They’re sculpture.

“I build robots that have no function,” says the understated MacMurtrie.

Crowds have gathered for shows in Europe, Asia and South America, and New Yorkers can get a glimpse of a 30-foot-long hydraulic “Too Big Dog Monkey” robot this month at El Museo del Barrio’s biennial in Manhattan.

The idea was born more than a decade ago when MacMurtrie, in a frenzy of creativity, disrobed and threw himself upon a thickly layered work-in-progress painting. As the paint began to dry on his body, he found himself forced to emerge from an artificial sort of skin.

“I was regressing into a very primitive state of coming to life for the first time,” he says. “It was a complete and utter epiphany… .That was the main inspiration for bringing this metal to life.”

Founded by MacMurtrie in 1992, Amorphic Robot Works (www.amorphicrobotworks.org) is the name of his ever-changing cast of artistic collaborators. The operation is based in Red Hook, Brooklyn, where the group is quietly creating a society of “primitive machines”. There are more than 250 computer-controlled machines, ranging from 12 inches to 90 feet long.

The robots struggle to stand, walk and play instruments, sometimes resembling infants in their movements, other times seeming like frightening cyborgs. Each work explores body language and movement, a long-time interest of MacMurtrie’s.

“I’m not about robotics. I’m an artist that’s using robotics as a way to express my ideas,” he says. “I’m interested in it more ultimately as artwork.”