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This year Robodock turns 10, and they’re pleased as punch to have San Francisco’s Survival Research Labs (SRL)
joining in the big birthday show. SRL, founded by Mark Pauline in 1978, is considered to be the foremost pioneer in the
world of industrial performance art. They’re known for appropriating thunderous and formidable machinery
normally intended for military or industrial use, and tweaking it to suit their own twisted purposes.
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Before Survival Research Lab’s mechanical whirlwind is unleashed during Robodock,
founder Mark Pauline shares trade secrets, and offers a glimpse at the inner
workings of their notoriously explosive entertainment.
BY MARK WEDIN
PHOTO BY RAIMOND WOUDA
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Maintaining the faith Since the beginning, particularly with the larger shows, Pauline has carved out long
wordy titles that bear a blatant smirk between the words. This year: ‘A Complete Mastery of Sinister Forces
Employed With Callous Disregard To Produce Catastrophic Changes In The Natural Order of Events’. Gorgeous. But
what does it all mean? ‘Historically, people have connected themselves with things more powerful than they actually deserve,’ explains
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After recently arriving here with over 45,000 pounds of devastating machinery,
the crew quickly got to work reassembling some of their old favourites, including the V1 (a replica of a WWII
German buzz-bomb engine modified to generate a continuously throbbing racket at 45Hz, you might want to bring
earplugs) and the Hovercraft (loaded with a large industrial fan for lift, and four incandescent pulse jets for acceleration and steering which, altogether, at
150 decibels, is likely the loudest robot in the world, yeah, you should definitely bring earplugs). There’s also a few
new creations, like the improved Mr Satan (a large face of you-know-who sculpted from a 300-pound block of solid
stainless steel with a propane furnace
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that discharges bursts of fire through his eyes and mouth) and the Flame Saucer (a deceptively small metal trinket on a
pole that spits flames in all horizontal directions creating a forty-foot diameter blaze), and a dozen other contraptions,
many of which will be set to destroy themselves by the end of the show. If that weren’t enough, they also
picked up an additional 20 tons of various metal objects from a nearby scrapyard. ‘There’s a reason why people
don’t do the kinds of shows we do,’ says Pauline, as other oil-covered members of the crew amble around the large NDSM
warehouse with welders and heavy metal hammers, ‘because, ultimately, it’s more or less impossible. We’re lucky. We
have a really good crew of people and
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we’—THAWOOM!—‘Oh, alright. That was a good one.’ Pauline glances over his shoulder at a giant wooden spool that
has just been hurled into the air. ‘We’re making a launcher,’ he explains. ‘It’ll go a
little faster than that. It’ll be up another ten degrees and then we’ll have a release
that drops them. It’ll probably go two-and-a-half times that fast.’ Their shows are more than mere
technical displays of cold steel and hot fire (and often various animal carcasses
thrown in for good measure), they’re genuine theatrical events, missing only
two things: human performers and any sense of subtlety. THATAKAFOOM! ‘Oh
hey. That went better. Just get her up a little higher and add a release mechanism... Yeah, that’ll work.’
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Pauline. ‘That’s been a means to gaining power. We’re doing sort of a comedy show about that. It’s like a tribute to people who believe in magical things organised in a
way to injure or kill people. Except we’re making fun of them.’ Often, the themes in the shows allude
to political statements, messages of sorts, but in the end, they offer no clear answers, no clear statements. ‘We’re just trying to create imagery,’ says Pauline.
‘We try to get across an opinion, a style of looking at something. But there’s no language or communication that goes on in
the show.’ His approach is reminiscent of young minds who’ve familiarised themselves with far too much of the political corruption running rampant in the world,
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20-26 September 2007 AmsterdamWeekly
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Realising that perhaps the best thing to do to maintain sanity is to poke fun, and of
course, watch your own ass.‘It’s not an aloof activity,’ says Pauline. I do the complicated parts on the
machines and build a lot of them, most of hem I do myself. It’s not like you’re some painter in New York, and you have someone do all your paintings for you, like the
New York artists do lately. Everyone here s highly involved in the work. You never really get to like it that much, ’cause it’s so
unpleasant to do. It’s not fun. We don’t have fun here. What we do is funny someimes. It’s ridiculous. But it’s too much
work to be fun.’ He’s not being facetious. After a slew of incidents early on—in 1982, he blew apart his right hand while preparing a
ocket for a show (later, doctors sewed wo of his toes on as fingers for added dexterity) and he was named a suspect in
he FBI’s Unabomber case—Pauline quickly learned to take great care in his work (in some ways). Naturally, these and
other episodes soon spurred him to cult igure status, which apparently means nothing to him. At times, he even seems
unaware of it. He and SRL continue on,regularly spawning additional morsels for the grapevine.
Rumours pervade Understandably, a long-running show known for creating cataclysmic entertainment will have a number of tales
ollowing it around. Surprisingly—and gratifyingly—many of them are true. But a few exaggerations have been supplemented.
There’s the story of Pauline’s involvement with some local squatters in the ’80s, who were undergoing yet another planned eviction. In
some circles, the story has grown to legendary status, Including a version with a giant robot that
Pauline constructed to chase the police away. While picking at cuticles on the ball of deformed flesh that is his right hand,
Pauline sheds light on the of?cial account.We just helped ’em burn down the squat.
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It’s all gonna explode real good. Child’s play Pauline beams when asked about his three-year-old son. ‘It’s great having a kid.
It’s nice to see him enjoying all the machines. He loves the machine shop, and cries when we try to make him leave.
I got him driving the forklift around. He can lift it up and move stuff around. He actually keeps me more focused because
when I’m not doing parenting, and I have time for SRL, I try to make sure I don’t just dick around. I actually get more done
these days.’ Happily, this doesn’t mean SRL don’t continue to enjoy a healthy amount of mischief. For these long-time
pranksters, it runs in their veins. ‘I remember our New York City show in ’88, we made three million dollars of
really perfect counterfeit money and blew it up in these leaflet bombs above the audience. Everybody took the money
and spent it all over the city, so there was this wave of counterfeit money. I had some guy who didn’t speak English in
San Francisco, and he made it for us. He made three colour plates... beautiful... we had the perfect paper...’ Pauline smiles
with the memory. ‘Somehow we did it and left and I never heard anything from anybody about it. It was just one of those
things, I thought it would be kind of cool and funny. There was a carnival next door. The carnies came the next morning
and picked up the money still on the ground—all of it—they were swarming the place the next morning and they gave
it back to people at their show as change.’ As for revealing recent off-the-record shenanigans, Pauline hesitates, then
smiles. ‘I shouldn’t really talk about it...it’s just stupid stuff. But I think someone gave me a bunch of hydrogen generators
and we made an eight-foot-diameter hydrogen balloon inside the shop. Then we brought it out and attached about ten
pounds of [potentially explosive] magnesium and a fuse and let it go. It had about |
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They said the police were gonna kick ’em out, and I said, well, do you wanna burn
the entire building down in like, a minute?’ The squatters responded affirmatively, many enthusiastically and Pauline gave them instructions in his
characteristically dry, matter-of-fact way,as if explaining his grandmother’s recipe
for pecan pie. ‘First thing you do is break out all the windows, then saw holes through the
floors all the way to the ceiling and make a chimney, or a flue really, and break down all the doors between the rooms.
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After a slew of incidents early on in 1982, he blew apart his right hand while preparing a rocket for a show (later doctors sewed two of his toes on as fingers
for added dexterity) and he was named a suspect in the FBIs Unabomber case Mark Pauline quickly learned to take great care in his work (in some ways)...
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fifty or sixty pounds of lift. You could barely hold it down. It went probably thirty-thousand feet up in the air, hit the winds going thirty, forty miles an hour
and it just headed over to Oakland. I have no idea what happened. I just know from the speed and the other physicists that were in the shop, they said it must’ve
went that high. ‘And sometimes, you know, we just run the machines in the city [of San Francisco]. Take the V1 down to the city
street and set it off for about five minutes, then drive away with it. It shakes all
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After that, we found these huge drums of wax, took some of it, cast things out of it and put the wax on rags and wood, while
other guys made these huge fire piles on the bottom floor, and we helped ’em make a couple backpack flamethrowers and we
let ’em borrow some big military smoke generators so they smoked in the police before burning the whole building down.’
Undoubtedly, none of this solved any of the squatters’ gripes, but it was probably more satisfying than holding hands and
singing songs about freedom. Reports have also come in about SRL shows requiring the audience to sign away
their lives before entering a show. This is true. ‘Yeah, but that’s something the promoter does,’ explains Pauline. ‘I don’t
make people do that. You can’t really sign
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away your future rights, at least not in the US. In some ways it’s worse to have people do that. If you make someone sign
away their future rights and then something happens, that could mean that you knew it was too dangerous for a person to
be attending. People do it because they think it’ll trick people into thinking that they have no right to sue. That’s the only
pretence. It certainly doesn’t protect you.’ Pauline makes no attempt to propagate any of the myths that surround him.
Countless articles have portrayed him as a furious agitator filled with hate for the world, a sweltering revulsion that’s
fuelled his work for nearly 30 years. Naturally, with this in mind, meeting him for the first time may seem a bit daunting. But
in person, he’s entirely affable and
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relaxed like an honest car mechanic whom you feel you can trust entirely with your vehicle. ‘Hmm, yeah. I can be pretty
sarcastic, I guess.’ He has to think for a moment about the discrepancy between the reports and reality most of the press
seems to play very little in his own head. ‘Well, most of the people who write that stuff have probably never met me. I suppose people just assume that if you do
anything sarcastic or satirical, then that’s the way you are. I don’t think I’ve ever been like that. I don’t know why people
think that. But it’s fine with me. It keeps people off your back.’ Perhaps it’s comforting to know that the man who is
considered by many to be the father of robotic hell, is really just a soft-spoken sweetheart, and a very good dad.
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the buildings in the neighbourhood. We left and the police came and there wasn’t anything there. They didn’t know where
it came from or what happened. ‘Just operating these things in public can be pretty destructive. Generally, I like
the idea of doing those kinds of things in urban settings where you’re not supposed to do them, rather than in a setting
where you’re supposed to like out in a field in the middle of nowhere. People go to urban areas because they’re more
exciting. So there needs to be some genuine excitement to make urban areas feel urban. And I’ve always liked to provide
for that.’
Robodock, NDSM-terrein, 19-22 September, €17.50-27.50/night, http://www.robodock.nl
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