Escape Velocity (17 page)

the Santa Barbara oil fields. Unlike many artists, he felt an affinity with technology. "Creative people have never had this kind of industrial equipment and machinery; it's always been denied them," he told an interviewer. "It's all tied in with . . . this idealistic, romantic 19th century notion that creative people are these frail, delicate, spiritual shells that are about to flit away and evaporate at any minute, lest we turn our backs on their pitiful, washed-out efforts. So another part of my intention was to disavow that notion and do something really intense. Today, the main option people have for expressing themselves powerfully is through machines.""

Machine Sex caught the attention of San Francisco's avant-garde community. In 1982, Matt Heckert became a member of SRL, followed shortly thereafter by Eric Werner. Heckert was a self-taught mechanic who had logged long hours hot-rodding the family car; Werner had worked at oil fields in Wyoming and aerospace firms in Orange County, California. Both had attended the San Francisco Art Institute.

From 1982 until 1988, the trio staged thirteen confrontational, increasingly ambitious stunts. (In '87 and '88, respectively, Werner and Heckert left SRL to pursue solo careers.) A Cruel and Relentless Plot to Pervert the Flesh of Beasts to Unholy Uses (1982), which took place in San Francisco, crossed an antivivisectionist's worst nightmare with a taxidermist's wildest dream. The show made dramatic use of the "organic robots" that have earned SRL the undying wrath of animal rights activists: the grotesque Mummy-Go-Round, a carousel fitted with desiccated animal cadavers, the maws of its mummified riders frozen in silent snarls, and a machine incorporating the remains of a dog, mounted on an armature and anchored to a radio-controlled cart. Actuated, the dog-machine lunges forward, its head spinning in ghoulish imitation of cartoon violence.'^

"The use of dead animals started out as a vaccine to keep audiences from strolling down that easy road of Disneyfication that beckons whenever they see any kind of mechanical puppet show," explains Pauline. "It's distinctive because you know it isn't putty or rubber, unlike Hollywood gore, which is the only other place people see special effects that remind them of the delicacy of the human form turned inside out."

Deliberately False Statements: A Combination of Tricks and Illusions Guaranteed to Expose the Shrewd Manipulation of Fact (1985), also mounted in San Francisco, was a gleeful Armageddon. The Screw Machine, a fourteen-

hundred-pound radio-controlled robot, scooted along on corkscrew treads, seizing hapless devices with its hydraulic arm and dashing them to the ground with screw-popping force. The Walk-and-Peck Machine, designed and built by Heckert, scuttled about on beetle legs and spiked wheels, raining blows on other machines with its bird-beaked armature. Dragging himself shudderingly forward on spidery metal arms, the Sneaky Soldier conjured the image of a dying GI, disemboweled by a land mine, with horrifying realism.

Misfortunes of Desire: Acted Out at an Imaginary Location Symbolizing Everything Worth Having (1988), described by Pauline as "SRL's Paradise Lost" was held in the parking lot of New York's Shea Stadium. Set against a hastily erected Eden replete with palm trees and flowerbeds, the show made use of the one-ton Walking Machine, an enormous, crate-shaped, four-legged rover. The twenty-foot-long Inchworm, a nasty-looking vehicle whose saber-toothed jaws give it the look of a giant Venus flytrap, was also featured. When the pace threatened to drag, a flamethrower that spat forty-foot tongues of fire kept things lively. From time to time, a Shock Wave Cannon let loose with a thunderous boom that shook windows and jiggled innards.

The events staged by SRL are war games in the literal sense-a combination of killing field and carnival midway, meant to explode media myths about surgical strikes and collateral damage in an entertaining fashion. Always oblique, often open-ended, Pauline's Circus Machinus lends itself to multiple, sometimes contradictory interpretations. It does not so much critique our relationship with technology as crystalize it. SRL's theater of operations can be seen as a meditation on the gamelike nature of military strategy, an object lesson in the theatrical unreality of war, or a black comedy about arms proliferation. Partaking equally of the madhouse and the fun house, SRL performances produce a queasy mixture of horror and hilarity. "I make weapons to tell stories about weapons," says Pauline. "SRL shows are a satire of kill technology, an absurd parody of the military-industrial complex."

He and his dozen-odd, mostly male coworkers have stockpiled an arsenal in the machine shop where they live and work, on the outskirts of San Francisco's Mission District. One device, an electromagnetic rail gun, can liquefy a metal bar and send the molten blob streaking through the air.

to explode on impact. "SRL's answer to George Bush's call for 'a thousand points of light,' " the artist deadpans.

SRL is at work on human-sized robots called Swarmers whose group behavior is governed by an artificial life program running on their onboard computers. The program, which the SRL software engineer Raymond Drewry based on code written by MIT programmers, is similar to those used to create "flocking" effects in computer animation-schools of fish, clouds of falling leaves. To date, SRL has completed four Swarmers-the minimum number required for the robots to exhibit emergent behavior. Each is equipped with an emitter-detector device; the program instructs it to move toward whichever machine is nearest, but as soon as it's within a certain distance of the other Swarmer, it beats a hasty retreat. Pauline describes the aggregate effect as "this weird behavior where they clump together, swarming around." He calls the manic machines "a response to the increased influence mob behavior has had in world events."

The Low-Frequency Generator, a mobile, radio-controlled, reaction jet engine, is 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 twelve 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 forty-five times per second, creating a strobe effect. It's the sort of phenomenon that doesn't exist anywhere else on Earth."

Shortly after the Persian Gulf War, SRL built a teleoperated high-pressure air launcher that uses a blast of pressurized CO2 to shoot a projectile with brute force. Teleoperation, defined by the technology journalist Howard Rheingold as "the human experience of seeing out of the eyes of a machine, and using natural gestures to direct machines to manipulate the physical world," was developed for military applications such as remote-controlled weaponry and industrial uses in undersea oil rigs, nuclear power plants, and other environments hostile to human workers.'^ When a tele-operator moves his computer-tracked head, the head of a distant robot "slaved" to his motions swivels correspondingly; when the operator gestures

Smart Bar. Phow. SKID

Timothy Leary at "Shiva's Erotic Banquet' rave, 1992. © 1992 Don Lewis

R. U. Sirius. © 1993 Ban Nagel Mondo 2000. © 1993 Ban Nagel

Disassembly line: video for "Happiness in Slavery," by Nine Inch Nails. Directed by Trent Reznor and Jonathan Reiss, featuring Bob Flanagan. © 1992 Nothing/TVT/Imerscope Records. Courtesy of Nothing ITVT/Interscope Records.

David Myers with Feedback Machine.

Photo:Judith Norma

Elliott Sharp. Photo: Hendhk Lietman

MarkTrayle with Power Glove.

Photo: Jim Block

Front Line Assembly. © 1995 The All Blacks B.V Used by permission of Roadrunner / Third Mind Records.