Machine Sex, SRL
Poster for "Machine Sex", San Francisco, February 1979
Lamia Priestley April 25, 2024
In 1978, Mark Pauline founded a new San Francisco based arts organisation called Survival Research Lab (SRL). The organisation puts on large-scale performances, which through extreme engineering, seek to liberate industrial machines from their own functionality. Machine Sex was their first performance.
At a Chevron gas station in San Francisco in February, 1979, encircled by a modest crowd, Pauline brought out “The Demanufacturing Machine,” a creation built of sharp blades, a conveyor belt, a plastic dome and an ejector. The performance began when Pauline placed eight self-caught dead pigeons into the jaws of the machine. The birds whisked through the machine’s innards and came flying out onto the crowd as blood and guts. The pigeons placed in the machine were dressed as “OAPEC dignitaries” wearing traditional middle eastern outfits and, throughout the performance, a loudspeaker played The Cure’s Killing of an Arab at a volume that was reportedly “too loud.”
“When you see an SRL show, you either see God or the insides of your eyelids.”
The Demanufacturing Machine, February 1979
The fact that Machine Sex took place at a gas station and coincided with the fall of the Shah of Iran and the ensuing oil crisis suggests some political commentary on the part of Pauline. On what, it’s hard to be sure. Most of SRL’s performances have exploited a similar kind of absurdity, weaving together seemingly disparate, and often bizarre, cultural references into their machine based theatrics to create an intense experience for the viewer. As one onlooker put it, “when you see an SRL show, you either see God or the insides of your eyelids.”And, as new performances were brought to the “stage” following Machine Sex, the spectacle only grew.
The team spends years dismantling advanced technologies, modifying them and recasting them as characters in their performances which often involve violent clashes between machines, pyrotechnics, and even blood and gore. The charismatic machines, set upon each other to produce military-grade theatre, are themselves impressive feats in engineering. The 1985 New York show starred the flame shooting Stu Walker, the world’s first robot in a performance controlled by an animal, Pauline’s Guinea Pig, and the 1997 Austin show featured the monumental Hand O God, a massive hand of air-cylinder fingers holding 8 tons of pressure. Audiences consistently reported fearing for their safety. The drama swelled as more and more ingenuity was pumped into SRL’s creations, which were often destroyed in the process of performance, sacrificed for the viewer’s entertainment.
The violence alone makes it easy to interpret SRL’s shows as commentary on the threat of technological advancement, especially when set in the context of the late-1970s, early-1980s and the rapid growth of the Bay Area’s tech industry. That interpretation may have even more salience today, in the era of Artificial Intelligence, when it often seems as though technology’s evolutionary drive has been let loose, sheared from our own, wholly out of our control. At a time when the media is inundated with thought pieces on AI’s imminent take over through means most of us hardly understand, a performance that frames the man vs. machine dynamic as a straightforward showdown has resonance.
“The immense workmanship behind SRL’s creations says more about what it is to be human than what our future with machines might look like.”
Mark Pauline and Matt Heckert operate the Inchworm, Inspector, and Big Walker
But despite the gruesome nature of their performances, SRL’s machines also touch on a more profound, spirited side of man’s relationship to machine, a side seldom considered amidst today’s progressively less enchanting experiences of technology. The machines in combat do more than play out a dystopian tech prophecy, they are deliberately made as masterpieces in engineering. Years of unimaginable effort go into rewiring these machines of their designed functions, removing their utilitarian value, rendering them incarnations of time spent. In that sense, the immense workmanship behind SRL’s creations says more about what it is to be human than what our future with machines might look like.
Pauline once described the project of SRL—his life’s work—as a “decade long prank.” This prank, he explained, has been “executed with an unfathomable degree of meticulousness and precision, the uncompromising pointlessness of it revealing the banality of most everything.” In committing his life to the task of undoing purpose in machines, Pauline makes clear an essential difference between man and machine: humans, like Pauline, have the freedom to be pointless, to do pointless things. Goalless in their undertaking of a silly amount of violence, his machines have been endowed with uniquely human qualities. Freed from their banal fates, their irreverence is matched by only that of their makers.
There’s a gleeful thrill in watching the world’s most inventive machines go up in flames for no apparent reason at all. Though they may be perceived as no better than teenage boyishness, SRL performances are life affirming for their audiences. As one critic writes, “Mark Pauline has spent the last 37 years making machines that remind you that you’re going to die.” But perhaps it's not only the machines’ destruction that reminds us of this fact but the machines themselves. As our lives become increasingly tethered to technology, and we ourselves live more mechanically, more efficiently, entrenching deeper technological systems into each and every one of our experiences, SRL’s crazed machines, ironically, wake us up to human life.
“What escapes the machine, even the computer, even networks of computers, even the human mind in its automatic phases is this capacity to escape from its own determination.” - Enlightenment Aberrations: Error and revolution in France, David Bates”
Lamia Priestley is an art historian, writer and researcher working at the intersection of art, fashion and technology. With a background in Italian Renaissance Art, Lamia is currently the Artist Liaison at the digital fashion house DRAUP, where she works with artists to produce generative digital collections.
