The following interview appeared in Exposure Magazine in Dec. 1994. The interview was by Julian Holman. The "colorful" description below was created by Jim Krank. Exposure Magazine is published in Australia. Mark Pauline is an alchemist, animating infernal machines from the ruins of planned obsolescence. Synthesizing sophisticated military-industrial technology with gallows humor (and a real-big) dictionary), since 1979 he has directed his Survival Research Laboratories (SRL) in the production of almost 50 machine performances. Typical shows (some titles: Misfortunes of Desire: Acted Out at an Imaginary Location Symbolizing Everything Worth Having , A Cruel and Relentless Plot to Pervert the Flesh of Beasts to Unholy Uses ) confront the cordoned-off, pummeled audience with the reality of a violence usually limited to the news media. Beasts with iron lungs breathe smoke and flame, mechanized marionettes performing a Progressive dance to the death. This ritualized destruction is both a contemporary potlatch, and a panacea for the worst excesses of capitalism - a crucible to absolve us all. SRL are our Theater of Cruelty, an assault on the Situation Normal All Fucked Up of consumer society. In the absence of human Performers, or even dialogue, SRL describe new vocabularies of flame, mechanized gesture, and the piercing sounds of me(n)tal fatigue. In the aftermath of the Gulf War, organic warriors are as redundant as Bosch. Read on .... Jim Krank What was the initial impetus behind SRL? I'd been trained for basically two things: I had a degree in visual arts and I had pretty extensive experience in the trades - engineering, making machines, devices. I wanted to create some kind of system that could be tailored specifically to my interests and needs and skills and to incorporate as many of them as possible. It was very calculated. I literally sat down for about a two week period and figured out the basic form. I'd envisioned at the outset that we would be able to do these huge Performances for big audiences, that it would be this thing that would rival other popular culture events but would be extremely different from them. Was there a relationship to theater in your mind when setting up SRL? Oh, yeh. There always has been. I have a background in theater, experimental theater and I was always more interested in creating an event that was based on the juxtaposition or combination of things over time. I didn't want to do just a sculpture exhibition. How choreographed is it? It's as choreographed as we can make it. There is, like, a written script which all the operators have and we've had, a couple of times, time to rehearse this script. Of course, it's very unpredictable. We try to use as much equipment as we possibly can in any situation. That way when things change the machine breaks, or it can't work exactly the way you expected it to there's more equipment there to take up the slack. How attracted are you to the possibility of chance actions arising between the machines? There always are. Sometimes, those are the most interesting actions. I'd say that the intentional things, on a point-by-point basis, that there are more of them. How do you develop the theme? By the time that you get a title, it's usually a few weeks before a show. I like to have as much of the Performance as fixed as possible before I come up with a specific title for it. You start out very non-specifically where there are just big machines that are being built that are very complicated, pretty general purpose, and then as the theme comes into play you start thinking well, you know, I should actually choose this machine over that machine because you cad make more dramatic visual metaphors with this set of machines. Then you start modifying those to specifically suit the performance and then start building sets and prop pieces. It seems as though you cast it like in the theater, fitting the available hardware to the theme. I think that it's like anything else; it's just a human activity, there are just certain Logistical rules that are involved in creating complicated events, taking a bunch of work and condensing it down to a certain point. It just happens to be the same for theater. It just happens to be the same for a military campaign. You are doing it because you are not really sure what's going to happen and because the goals are not really specific either. You're just trying to find out what the result of the work will be. One of the things that struck me while I was watching the tapes of your show was that what was created when the machines went out was an actual, specific language that I hadn't seen before, a visual theatrical language that seemed to me to be extremely relevant to the contemporary themes that you were talking about. Is that evident to you? Oh, yeh. I think that's one of the nice things about it. Because of the nature of the physical world a lot of the work is just done for you. There is a natural language, in the same way that there's a natural affinity that physical objects have for each other, like physical principles are enacted almost arbitrarily, an alchemicaI thing. You're just there and if you have enough stamina something will eventually happen. It's very difficult to generate that kind of a language if you're just using static objects. Or if you just tried to have people performing. There's a real critical mass you have to reach with that particular kind of language, any language of technology, so that you get beyond the technical aspect of it and other things begin to happen. Otherwise, with the shows, I'd probably make them simpler. Another interesting aspect of your work is that it seemed to unite two sides of America: one is its technological genius and the other side is its initial radical libertarianisnt, the anarchic side. Do you see something of that in the work you do? As far as I'm concerned, l just think that the only way to maintain your optimism is through a clear understanding of technology. The people who are really doing interesting things are the creativetype people who are really using technology. If you're a creative person and you are not using technology, you are really going to be disenfranchised. I continue to be really interested in it because there's still the hope of affecting the culture, putting across a position which is at odds with what people would expect to hear in the media or whatever. To me, it's the only way to do that and to get people to pay attention to what you're doing and take it seriously. We get taken pretty seriously by people in other laboratories, to the point where someone at NASA would say, well hey we're doing this great thing, why don't you come down here and check it out, we want to come down here to your lab and see what you're doing. To me that's very encouraging because what we have to offer them is just ways of realistically dealing with technology outside the sort of way that is done now. What about the crossover between art and science that you display? I mean, the good thing about technology is that it cuts out a lot of the bullshit. You have to be so rigorous and work so hard to be able to use technology effectively that I think it separates out people who are serious from people who aren't serious. People talk about it as a co-option thing but everything's co-optive. The fact of the matter is that if artists don't become conversant with technology then they'll just be left out of the culture more than they are now. I think that with people who don't have to work full-time and who are just thinking about Stuff naturally, there is a greater chance that they will think of things in a way to find interesting conclusions. I think that the voice of people that aren't working needs to be heard more and I think that the only the way that will happen is by people being conversant with technology. So it's another level of casting. Yeh, there's a level of casting going on. People choosing what they want to do, which is based on their interests and who they are and then me choosing, trying to decide. Usually it just works out that if someone wants to do something, it will probably be OK. Where do you get your equipment from? There are a lot of different ways. Sometimes I go into old factories, take stuff apart, you just scrounge around and find stuff. There's so much stuff that is just cast aside in the States, in California it's sort of unbelievable. You can literally go out and pick up a ton of equipment every week, very high quality, functional equipment, parts, components, materials, tools, really nice tools. What about the cruise missile? The cruise missile motor. There's these guys, they're auto wreckers and they buy defense department stuff, weapons components, rocket launchers, cruise missile engines. This was a cruise missile engine that was a prototype engine, a test engine, built in '77. It was a hundred and fifty dollars. You can buy those engines but they cost two to three hundred thousand dollars. What about this relationship with the military-industrial complex? On the one hand you're using their equipment but you're using it to criticize... Everyone uses their equipment. All technology is military technology. No technology is civilian technology. This tape recorder is like a military device that has been commercialized. I think it's great to be using it like that. It's an aberration that artifacts of that quality were produced in the first place and it's less likely that there will be that kind of stuff in the future. So I think that in some ways it preserves, it's recapturing the value that stuff never really had. Those artifacts exist at the furthest envelope of materials and there's usually no justification for that outside the military. Do you ever see a moral aspect to technology? Yeah, there's always a moral aspect to technology. I can see that. I like the fact of working with used equipment. The idea that you are taking these things and creating new lives for them, for me that's sort of sounds insane but in a way you really are. You're taking things and recharacterising them. Maybe there's some sort of moral aspect to that, I don't really know. The immoral aspect is what you do with it. I don't do things that kill people. I try to make sure that it's intense but to not to cross the line so that people get injured. Is this rebirth of technology within a different context part of the motivation? Personally, I just like fiddling with stuff. I like fiddling with things. I like fiddling with ideas that are compelling enough that maybe people are interested in (them), that maybe they affect peoples choices or whatever, at least to provide that information. Another thing that struck me was that there was all this creative energy that was being directed towards destroying things. Now that's part of the show, part of theme, etc, but have you ever done works in which the point is to create in some way? It's not.really possible to do that. It's hard to really say what is a creation and what's not. Rockets create a lift-off by destroying the fuel and the fuel is destroyed. Cars move from place to place because they destroy the environment and also destroy the fuel and damage the oil that they have in them and damage their components. The machines are destroying themselves from the moment they're created. I think that's just the nature of machines. I think that's also the nature of humans. Humans are destroying themselves from the minute they are born. You're wearing down, you're getting old. I think that it's different in a show because of course it's accelerated and I think it's more of a metaphor for natural forces, the destruction of a natural force. It's also a very healthy way to think about technology. It's a transitory thing. The intention is to create this situation where all your work is just basically discarded to the winds and to see what you think about that and what that really means. Most of the time people have a really weird protective, paternalistic attitude towards their technology. I think part of an SRL show is to surrender it, surrender the idea that your work is precious and that it's important and then the reverence we have for this is reasonable. I think that's part of what the destruction's about, not so much about 'cause I'm into destruction. What about SRL's links to the American punk scene? I went to a college where a lot of members of the early punk scene went to college, like Arto Lindsay from DNA, I went to school with him, and Gordon Stevenson who was in Teenage Jesus and the Jerks and Exene from X and her sister both hung around the school, did weird art performances back in like '73 and '4. I moved out to San Francisco and looked the same as I had for years and so did everybody else, all this youth culture thing, and I was just never very interested in music to do it. So I just thought, well I can sympathize with this approach to tearing down a certain sort of encrusted institutions but I said who cares about music? Why would anybody want to tear that down? I didn't seem to me that interesting. My idea was that I would sort of do this other thing and it ended up being a thing about the art scene. How do you want to develop SRL from here? Technically, there are a few areas that we're going to work in. We're gonna to work on a class of robots that can fly, like levitating type platforms that move around in a show to get another dimension to things. Also, more closely-coupled systems, between the operator and the machine. There's also another class of machines that I'm working on now that have complicated ways that they move that will require computer controlled stuff to work really fast, much more dramatic, that'll be really unstable. More into working with the kind of technology or knowledge-based systems that are more current, even than what we do now which in many ways is very current. Right now we want to be able to do these Shows in a way that we can still retain the immediacy for larger audiences and that's why I want to have flying machines. You need machines that are completely incomprehensible and which move very fast, like nothing anyone's ever seen before, so that the mystery of the show is maintained even though it's bigger. Those are the directions that I want to work in for the next probably five or seven years.