Robots Rampant
California artists spawn technological monsters

Survival Research Laboratories sounds like another high-technology startup, a purveyor of futuristic weapons perhaps. Actually this San Francisco-based organization does deal in complicated machines with a destructive bent. But the goal is not profit. It is art, performance art.

"We're trying to develop a theater that revolves around machines," says Mark Pauline, an expert welder and machinist who founded SRL about a decade ago. Working primarily with hardware scavenged from the region's many defunct factories and machine shops, Pauline's troupe has created such marvels as the One-Ton Walking Machine, which resembles a skeletal elephant; the Big Arm, a cross between a backhoe and a dinosaur; and the inspector, which looks like a terribly uncomfortable hospital bed equipped with long, clawed arms.

During an SRL performance, usually staged in a parking lot or other damage-resistant arena, the gasoline- and diesel-powered robots crawl, stagger and hurtle into one another to the accompaniment of a cacophonic sound track. Pauline and other SRL members usually lurk offstage, controlling the machines with radio transmitters. Some of the robots can also operate autonomously. A guinea pig encaged by a set of contact switches once piloted a flame-throwing walking machine. The Big Arm has recently been given a more conventional onboard brain: a programmable microprocessor.

SRL has won a following not only among avant-garde aesthetes but also among engineers, some of whom lend their expertise to the troupe. Phillip H. Paul, a mechanical-engineering researcher at Stanford University who has followed SRL's progress for some seven years, helped to design one of its noisiest "special effects" devices. Called the Shock-Wave Cannon, it focuses the explosion of an oxygen-acetylene mixture into a shock front that can shatter glass 100 feet away. "What impresses me most about SRL is their ability to tackle some pretty tough problems in a reasonable amount of time and at no cost," Paul says. He notes that machines such as the One_Ton Walking Machine, although relatively "crude and heavy," do essentially the same things that robots built for millions of dollars by Government and industrial researchers do.

Rick Rees of Bell Northern Research, who helped to design the Big Arm's computer-based control system, suggests that SRL fills a persistent void in modern culture. "Artists and engineers usually don't speak the same language," he says. "SRL is blazing new ground by trying to build a collaboration between art and technology."

Pauline professes dislike for most art that incorporates technology. Too often it "serves the status quo of the art world," he says. "The art world wants something very packaged and ordered." SRL shows are not very packaged and ordered. This was evident during a show one rainy night last spring in a parking lot outside Shea Stadium, in Flushing, N.Y. At one point the Walking Machine bumped into the two-story-high Big Wheel, a low-tech but dangerous-looking contraption made of oil drums welded together, and sent it rumbling into a light pole. SRL technicians rushed out and heaved the Big Wheel away from the swaying, sputtering light. Then the Big Wheel lurched toward the Shock-Wave Cannon. A fiery blast from the Sprinkler from Hell, an industrial sprinkler turned flamethrower, blistered the paint on the Big Wheel but failed to stop it. Finally the Big Arm seized the Big Wheel and stopped it just short of the Shock-Wave Cannon. The audience, soaked and shivering, shrieked its approval.

Asked later about the incident, Pauline said, "We planned it."

--J.H.

(c) Scientific American August 1988