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February 20, 2006 Vol. 77,
no. 6S
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| FLAMETHROWER:
Artist Mark Pauline creates mechanized performances that often end
in fire and explosions. His organization’s tagline is “producing
the most dangerous shows on earth.” (Photo provided by
Mark Pauline)
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Burning
man on campus
ATC speaker shares insight and video clips of his explosive work
Of the 85 people who have spoken in EECS/IEOR professor Ken Goldberg’s
Art, Technology and Culture (ATC) Colloquium, only one has been introduced
with the aid of a burning blow torch. With acetylene in the air, San
Francisco performance artist Mark Pauline took the stage on February
1 to deliver his talk, “Exploiting the Momentum of Self-Righteousness.” Pauline
is famous (or infamous) for the 60 or so fiery, often explosive theatrical
performances put on by his homebuilt machines and robots.
“Mark Pauline has been one of the people I’ve had in mind
for this lecture series since the beginning,” Professor Goldberg
told the audience.
Indeed, Pauline certainly fits the ATC bill. For nine years, the lecture
series has featured speakers who “discuss contemporary issues
at the intersection of digital media, emerging technologies, and aesthetic
expression, and how these issues impact our culture.” Pauline and his crew build machines and then often destroy them in
15- to 60-minute displays in front of a live audience. During video
clips shown at the lecture, audience members watched as robotic soldiers
crawled along the ground, getting crushed by other machines, a 20-foot
Trojan horse machine being destroyed by projectile 2x4s and eventually
exploding, and finally, a 30-foot ball of fire Pauline dubs “the
flame hurricane.”
Though critics label his work as “boys with toys” or “battle
bots,” Pauline says he’s seeking true artistic expression. “My
goal was always to create something genuinely original. I take a stab
at it, and sometimes it crashes and burns,” he says, delighting
at the pun.
“When I was young,” he continues, “I loved tools
and welding, but I had a loathing for anything practical.” He
explains that, as a young man, he worked in a tractor-trailer factory
and for a military
contractor before founding Survival Research Labs (SRL) in November
1978. As SRL’s mission states, it is “an organization of
creative technicians dedicated to redirecting the techniques, tools,
and tenets of industry, science and the military away from their typical
manifestations in practicality, product or warfare. Each performance
consists of a unique set of ritualized interactions between machines,
robots and special effects devices, employed in developing themes of
sociopolitical satire. Humans are present only as audience or operators.”
“I consider myself a common law engineer,” he told the audience. “I
build machines and get things done. I also love the thrill of seeing something
expensive destroyed.”
Pauline has also gotten himself tangled in a few shenanigans. Once,
some fake bombs were stolen from an SRL show and appeared around San
Francisco, creating
a bomb hysteria. In a fitting conclusion to his talk, Pauline referenced
Gustave Flaubert, saying, “Be bourgeois and boring in your daily life, so that
you may be violent and original in your work.”
For more information about SRL, go to www.srl.org/.
For a list of upcoming ATC lectures go to http://atc.berkeley.edu.
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