Survival Research Laboratories

Mark Pauline is extending an invite to a monster truck rally in hell. Pauline
is ringmaster/leader of Survival Research Labs, a Bay Area group (in)famous
within cyberculture for violent technoindustrial spectacles incorporating
customized robotics, massive flames, and an extremely twisted flare for
showmanship. After 50 or more shows in the U.S. and Europe, including a recent
Phoenix, Arizona event described by Bruce Sterling in last July’s issue of
Wired (“Is Phoenix Burning?”), Pauline and his colleagues are bringing
an event to Austin’s Longhorn Speedway.

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 Bu�uel, 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

This article appears in March 28 • 1997 and March 28 • 1997 (Cover).