Mean machines
28 July 2001

Move over Robot Wars, yesterday's junk just morphed into your wildest mechanical nightmare

Not every police department has to face bands of marauding robots threatening mayhem and death. So pity the poor cops of San Francisco. Just seven weeks ago they were dispatched to raid a scrapyard in the Bayview district to halt a rampaging group of angry automatons. Again.

The rampaging machines were the main attraction at an event staged among piles of wrecked cars by artist/engineer Mark Pauline. Pauline is founder of Survival Research Labs, an organisation dedicated to staging public performances with a difference.

SRL's props include a Shock Cannon that belches out "vortex rings"-shock waves that can knock you off your feet at 10 metres or shatter glass at 100. There's the Pitching Machine designed to shoot planks of timber at almost 300 kilometres per hour. Then there are flame-throwers built from second-hand jet engines, not to mention the monster mobile catapults. Pauline and his cohorts have even resurrected extreme military hardware such as pulse-jet engines of the kind that powered German V-1 "flying bombs" during the Second World War.

Controlled remotely or automated with self-evolving computer programs, these machines are set loose to tear, gouge, burn and trample each other. Since the late 1970s, SRL has put on dozens of these violent theatrical events worldwide, frequently attracting thousands of spectators. The local police and army may turn up too, whether invited or not. No surprise, considering the clashes make Robot Wars look like a vicarage tea party.

SRL's headquarters are located at the bottom of a dead-end street in a bleak San Francisco industrial zone. Every inch of the sprawling workshop is packed with the paraphernalia of invention. The rusting jaws and claws of dormant machines dangle from the ceiling; huge capacitor banks and strobe lights lurk in corners; the high-tech gadgetry which Pauline buys second-hand and sells on to make a living is strewn everywhere.

Outside, SRL's newest toy awaits reprogramming following a recent test run. This 300-kilogram, all aluminium hovercraft can shimmy along at 50 kilometres per hour, powered by four 1.3-metre-long pulse-jet engines. Fuelled by propane gas, the jets generate an ear-walloping 150 decibels of sound. "This must be the loudest robot in the world," Pauline says proudly.

Spectators are usually provided with earplugs, but Pauline's penchant for lung-scouring smoke, deafening noise, blinding lights and low-flying missiles probably leaves some people wishing they'd come wearing full-body armour. "I'm an old-time risk-taker," Pauline admits, an attitude presumably best shared by his audiences.

Take SRL's show at Yoyogi Stadium in Tokyo in 1999. Local safety officers began to fret as 250 3-metre baulks of wood, ejected at almost 300 kilometres per hour from the Pitching Machine, started to ricochet off the floor and splinter above the audience. Pauline recalls how the officials kept telling him to aim the machine lower so the planks would not land so close to the audience-though he thought at the time they were saying "slower". "I ignored them anyway," says Pauline. Then during a show in Graz, Austria, explosions panicked the locals who thought their town was being invaded. The next thing Pauline knew, the Austrian army turned up.

No surprise then that the authorities in San Francisco have moved to bring Pauline's activities to a halt. After a show in 1995, he was arrested on arson charges. Even the FBI has shown an interest. And despite what Pauline describes as SRL's "perfect safety record", his projects have so often been stymied by the authorities that he is now prepared to stage a full-scale event free of charge for anyone who secures the necessary permits. "I wouldn't consider what SRL does as being dangerous if they had an appropriate location to do it in," says San Francisco Fire Inspector Marta McGovern.

You certainly wouldn't want to get too close. Highlights of recent shows include the Running Machine, a six-legged monster that wields mechanical jaws on an articulated arm. Then there's the Taser, an electromagnetic rail gun copied from a propulsion system designed for submarines. Charged by a huge capacitor bank, it shoots balls of molten metal across the stage.

SRL's proximity to Silicon Valley has helped bring many of these robot dreams to fruition. Aside from attracting skilled tech industry collaborators who drop by in the evenings to help, Pauline can also get his hands on the latest technologies. He has tinkered with genetic algorithms-software that evolves-in an attempt to make robots called Swarmers exhibit flocking behaviour. "We were also the first to offer the public the chance to operate lethal machinery over the Internet," says Pauline.

He's referring to the Air Launcher, a contraption designed by NASA to trigger controlled avalanches with high explosives. Modified to shoot concrete-filled cans, it can now be operated remotely via the Internet. Operators from as far afield as Germany and Tokyo have successfully fired the launcher in San Francisco.

With names such as The Unexpected Destruction of Elaborately Engineered Artifacts, SRL's shows seem to subvert the pretensions of high-tech and high art. So is it art, socio-political satire or just geeks messing about with bombs? Mark Van Proyen of the San Francisco Art Institute considers the work "a theatrical event-a provocative sculpture of a brutal cast". But Pauline himself doesn't much care for such labels. "If it's in my interest to say it's art, I have no qualms about saying it's art," he admits with a shrug. "It's only for convenience."

His real aim, he says, is to groom the human race to face the inevitable. "Fitting into society is not just about fitting into a culture of humans, it's about fitting into a culture of technology," he says. Cutting loose 15 crazed cyborgs in central Tokyo just for fun is simply his way of helping people adjust to the chaos of everyday life. "People have to learn to deal with the craziness. It turns the city into what it should be-a jungle."

Copyright The New Scientist