Waging a Tinkerer’s War: Mechanical Spectacle
Escape Velocity Excerpts | Published on October 12, 2004
Chapter Three considers the machine art of rogue technologists like Mark Pauline, in which amok robots and humans menaced by heavy machinery dramatize popular anxieties over the growing autonomy of intelligent machines and the seeming obsolescence of humanity.
Pauline is the founder of Survival Research Laboratories, a loosely knit organization which has perfected a heavy metal theater of cruelty—scary, stupefyingly loud events in which remote-controlled weaponry, computer-directed robots, and reanimated roadkill do battle in a murk of smoke, flames, and greasy fumes.
A combination of killing field and carnival midway, SRL's theater of operations can be seen as a meditation on the game-like nature of military strategy, an object lesson in the theatrical unreality of war, or a black comedy about arms proliferation. "SRL shows are a satire of kill technology, an absurd parody of the military-industrial complex," says Pauline.
He and his dozen-odd, mostly male co-workers have stockpiled an arsenal in the machine shop where they live and work, on the outskirts of San Francisco's Mission District. One device, the Low-Frequency Generator, is a mobile, radio-controlled, reaction jet engine, modeled after the V-1 buzz bomb whose banshee shriek struck terror in Londoners during World War II. "We ran it and people heard it almost 12 miles away," says Pauline, with relish. "They had stories on the evening news asking anybody with information about the strange reverberations felt throughout the Bay Area to call the police. You can stand next to this thing and what it does to your brain is just...sublime. You feel as if there are rats in your chest. It shakes your eyeballs so much that they black out and come on again 45 times per second, creating a strobe effect. It's the sort of phenomenon that doesn't exist anywhere else on Earth."
Posted by Mark Dery at October 12, 2004 02:13 PM |