Survival Research Laboratories is a California-based performance art group established by Mark Pauline in 1979. Customized industrial machines made from a wide array of repurposed mechanical parts are remotely operated by humans to perform unique, and infamously loud, dangerous, and destructive shows in front of live audiences.
Mini-doc of a Tokyo performance:
A list and descriptions of their machines can be found here. Some appropriated mechanical devices used include a backhoe, tesla coil, jet engines, aircraft tires, car parts, and Master Mover tugs.
“What ever happens in the show, we’ll try to plan it out and stage it in a very carefully considered way but we intentionally pace the show very rapidly, and we intentionally layer very extreme elements — elements that most people would never be exposed to unless they had been in a war or something some time in their lives. And so the impressions that people are gonna get from that are very personal, in the same way that, if a thousand people saw an accident everybody would have their own personal version of it and those versions would not necessarily agree with each other. ” (Pauline, src)
SRL’s performances highlight a seminal issue which has been increasingly prevalent in industrialized societies. Through using technology in unintended ways, the performances help liberate the human condition from the claustrophobic, bureaucratic, orderly nature of modern society as imposed by these very machines. Similar to noise music, the destructive nature of the shows express the visceral level of catharsis to this release of the tensions felt between man and machine.
In another way, SRL expresses an escapist form of institutional critique.
“I started SRL with dissatisfaction for the other options I was trained for. I didn’t wanna work at a job, nor did I want to become part of the gallery/museum world… really just sort of an act of desperation… I didn’t like the experience of working with people as much as I liked the experience of working with machines, so I decided to try the experiment to see if it was possible to replace humans in a theatrical context with machines.” (Pauline, src)
I used to be a big fan. not that i am not anymore, I just forgot… so this doc was good to see.
i enjoyed Pauline’s line “where terrible things are being documented.. keep your eyes open and keep from being negative.”
I don’t see it as institutional critique though that would require more intention rather than a straight-out rejection of the institution. And in a way, hasn’t one institution been replaced with another set of contexts? grated, i think SRL is so hybrid they always are set apart from one framework and leverage several instead.
Yeah, that’s a valid point. SRL doesn’t necessarily happen from inside such a system, it doesn’t directly interact/intervene with them.
I think then SRL could be considered just a technological critique. SRL reminds me of a scene from the popular Hollywood movie A.I., where the (arguably sentient) “mechas” are destroyed in front of a live human audience, carnival style, as a celebration of humanity through a sort of cathartic rejection of the idea that technology possesses a possibly threatening potential to be more than just an extension of man, and thus the potential to enslave (perhaps more subtly than as portrayed by Hollywood).