Mark Pauline

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Mark Pauline (born Dec 14, 1953) is an American Performance Artist and Inventor, best known as founder and director of Survival Research Labs, a performance group whose installations are typically composed of machines and robots creating as much mayhem as the safety of onlookers permits. Pauline founded the group in 1978 and it is considered the main forebear of practitioners of "industrial performing arts" and of popular competitions pitting remote-controlled robots and machines against each other (see BattleBots and Robot Wars).

Pauline has written of SRL, "Since its inception SRL has operated as an organization of creative technicians dedicated to re-directing the techniques, tools, and tenets of industry, science, and the military away from their typical manifestations in practicality, product or warfare.".

In August 1990 ArtPark, a state-sponsored arts festival in Lewiston, N.Y., cancelled a Pauline perforamance when it turned out he intended "to cover a sputtering Rube Goldberg spaceship with numerous Bibles" that would "serve as thermal protective shields" and be burned to ashes in the course of the performance.(San Francisco Chronicle, August 14, 1990, [1]).

[edit] External links

• Website of Survival Research Labs
• National Public Radio report on SRL, with link to radio broadcast
• excellent and comprehensive July 1996 Wired magazine article on Pauline and SRL by Bruce Sterling