Survival Research Laboratories
Fri., March 28, 1997
Last August, when Pauline was in town making arrangements and finding a venue for his escapades, he appeared at Emo's to show SRL videos as a preview of what we might expect. One video showed a war zone as it might be conceived by Dali and Buñuel, a surreal synthesis of cultural/spiritual icons (clown, St. Mary, the Last Supper) toyed with and trashed by mechanical dinosaurs and spiderbots spouting flame and emitting an ear-splitting industrial whine. Postmodern theorists love to impose their templates of meaning on this stuff, but Pauline says only that "people are compelled to make a personal decision about what it means to them." But, he adds, "For me, it's a catharsis. I exorcise a lot of devils whenever I do a show."
The shows create a context that is attractive to an emerging breed of technoindustrial artisans, some of whom have fallen into a network loosely formed around SRL. The artists and engineers in this network participate whenever and however they can, so that SRL events grow larger, more logistically complex, and more spectacular with each show.
Though the shows, which are organized around a particular theme ("Crime Wave," "A Million Inconsiderate Experiments," and the postmodern apocalyptic crowd-pleaser, "A Calculated Forecast of Ultimate Doom: Sickening Episodes of Widespread Devastation Accompanied by Sensations of Pleasurable Excitement"), appear somewhat anarchic, they are actually as well-organized as a war zone can be. As time-based events rather than sculpture, they require the focus of a single leader, Pauline, who must orchestrate the efforts of participating humans and bots, achieving a consistent look and feel from diverse inputs.
Though SRL mythology implies a history of injured bystanders, Pauline notes that there's only been one injury at an SRL event, and that the person injured was drunk and had wandered into an area that was off-limits.
Come Friday, you'll have a chance to decide for yourself whether Pauline is a
whacked-out purveyor of ultraviolence or a postmodern P.T. Barnum creating
apocalyptic circus acts at the intersection of the Industrial and Information
eras. Until then, check out SRL's web page at http://www.srl.org.
-- Jon Lebkowsky
Survival Research Laboratories is appearing in Austin on Friday, March 28 at the Longhorn Speedway, 6401 US183 S. Advance Tickets can be purchased for $15 (earplugs included) at FringeWare and Sound Exchange; the price goes up to $20 at the show.
