Escape Velocity (16 page)

They use obsolete or discarded technology to enact what the cultural critic Andrew Ross calls "a communications revolution from below." Their aesthetic of refunctioning, retrofitting, and reanimating military-industrial junk is equal parts funk art and Frankenstein, shot

through with cyberpunk's pohtics of low-tech insurgency. Their quixotic machines mock the benefits of technological progress, the virtues of consumerism, and the benevolence of corporate America sold by the anthropomorphic robots of theme parks, trade shows, and Disneyfied malls.

Mechanical spectacle is a sort of Road Warrior bricolage, to borrow Claude Levi-Strauss's term (from the French noun bricoleur, meaning "tin-kerer" or "handyman") for the makeshift strategies, improvised with the odds and ends at hand, that the so-called "primitive" mind uses to make sense of the world around it. Though less cosmic and more overtly political than the myths and rituals of tribal "tinkerers," mechanical spectacle parallels primitive bricolage in its ad hocism and in the sense of sympathetic magic that suffuses it-the lingering assumption that even ritualized resistance to technocratic power produces tangible effects, if only in the minds of audience members.

Moreover, in staging techno-spectacles that feature few human players, if any, mechanical performance artists dramatize the disappearance of the human element from an increasingly technological environment. Then, too, Pauline and MacMurtrie's use of remote-controlled robots, "slaved" to the physical movements of human operators, reminds us of our ever more interdependent relationship with the machine world-a relationship in which the distinction between controller and controlled is not always clear.

The mechanical performance art of these avant-garde roboticists seems to pop out of any pigeonhole into which it is forced-proof, perhaps, of its newness. Even so, it is not without precedent. In the sixties, when the union of art and science in programs such as E.A.T. (Experiments in Art and Technology) seemed to promise wondrous monsters, a number of artists experimented with kinetic sculpture or interactive multimedia, much of it computer-controlled. Nam June Paik, the grandfather of video art, created Robot K-456, a six-foot-tall junk heap that had toy airplane propellers for eyes and a radio speaker mouth that blared John E Kennedy's inaugural address; as a showstopper, the robot excreted beans and twirled one of its mismatched Styrofoam breasts. Controlled (but only just) by a model aircraft radio transmitter, K-456 once tottered out of a gallery, flapping its arms and

menacing passersby ("One of your sculptures is walking down Fifty-seventh Street," reported an agitated gallery-goer).

A more recent parallel exists in the work of the British roboticist Jim Whiting, whose pop-eyed automata and ghostly, dancing shirts made the 1984 video to Herbie Hancock's instrumental "Rockit" an instant classic. Brought to life by computer-controlled pneumatic systems. Whiting's robots move with the pixilated jerkiness of characters in an old Rotoscope cartoon. Some have realistically rendered faces and are clad in formal attire. Other, less fortunate relatives are legless amputees or, sadder still, lone, writhing limbs. Seen in an art gallery installation, these humanoid mechanisms stir mingled emotions-pity, whimsy, childlike fascination, and in the case of the disembodied legs that dangle from overhead supports, fear. Kicking in midair, they cross the floating dance of a marionette with the frantic jig of a hanged man.

Robotics hobbyists are kindred spirits as well. Organized by the sculptor David Santos, the Motorola engineer Alex lies, and the designer jeweler Craig Sainsott, the Austin-based Robot Group began as a loose confederation of artists, engineers, and basement putterers and has evolved into an eighteen-member nonprofit organization. "I believe strongly in cultural robotics, robots that are works of art as well as technological marvels," says Santos, in the group's video press kit. "The sculpture of the future will be interactive, intelligent; it'll walk, it'll talk, it'll fly." Sainsott and his wife Charlene have made Santos's prediction a reality, after a fashion: Powered by pneumatics and controlled by computer, their Shrinking Robot Heads-mechano-musicians fashioned from old springs, wok lids, bicycle wheels, and shock absorbers-are a heavy metal group in the literal sense.

Sainsott, lies, and the computer programmer Bill Craig are working on the Mark IV, a fourteen-foot, silver-skinned blimp that scuds along, steered neither by wind nor human whim but by the two bidirectional motors that drive its propellers and its own robotic brains. In its automatic mode, the blimp uses sophisticated computer programs such as neural networks that pilot the flying machine with the aid of sonar data collected during training flights. "We don't want to do robots with a point," says lies, "because robots with a point are boring. If you forget about having a point, then you get stuff like this."^

Robot Wars, the mechanical melee that erupted in San Francisco in August 1994, catapulted do-it-yourself robotics into the public eye. The event, which was covered by the national media, pitted homemade, radio-controlled combatants against each other, among them a nasty little contraption with high-pressure spikes and a gas-powered saw, a hundred-pound robot modeled on a World War I tank, and the Master, a buzz saw on wheels. Marc Thorpe, one of the event's organizers, has high hopes for future Robot Wars: "Once you add the element of combat and survival [to cyberpunk low-tech], you are into football fan territory, which is a huge audience."^

Analogs in art history and grassroots robotics notwithstanding, the work of Pauline, MacMurtrie, and Goldstone sits most comfortably in the tradition of robot theater. Historically, robotics and dramatics are intertwined: The word robot itself was introduced into popular usage in a theatrical production-the Czech playwright Karel Capek's 1921 science fiction play, R.U.R = Rossum's Universal Robots—and the earliest known robots were performing machines, wonderworks born of science and sorcery, calculation and incantation.

Hero of Alexandria, a Greek engineer who lived in the first century A.D., is believed to have built a mannequin theater in which the god Bacchus sprayed wine from his staff while bacchantes danced. In the late Middle Ages, mechanized mannequins began appearing on clock towers. The Strasbourg clock was renowned for its elaborate "jackwork," or moving statues. Every day, at noon, the clock's cast-iron rooster crowed three times in remembrance of the apostle Peter's denial of Jesus.

None of these devices compared, however, with the clockwork automata of eighteenth-century roboticists. France's Jacques de Vaucanson was famed for his gilded copper duck, first exhibited in 1738. Goethe, Voltaire, and other leading lights in Europe's intelligentsia gaped at this miraculous contraption, which quacked, gobbled grain from its keeper's hand, flapped its wings, and excreted droppings. The Scribe, built in 1772 by the Swiss clock and watchmaker Pierre Jaquet-Droz and his son Henri-Louis, was no less astonishing. Set in motion, a life-size barefoot boy seated at a desk would dip his quill pen in an inkwell, shake it twice, and write a

preprogrammed text, moving to the next line when necessary. The automaton's eyes followed the moving pen, giving it an astonishingly lifelike air. Among the Scribe's repertoire of famous phrases was Descartes' axiom, "i

THINK, THEREFORE I AM."

Mechanisms that counterfeit life continue to captivate the human imagination. Millions have their first close encounter with robots in a Disney theme park, where creepily realistic, computerized characters perform in revues like the Enchanted Tiki Room, a Polynesian fantasia populated by Audio-Animatronic birds, flowers, and tribal masks that talk and sing. (Audio-Animatronic is Disneyspeak for the technology used in electronically animated robots whose sound tracks, issuing from hidden speakers, are synchronized with their movements.)

Traditionally, performing machines, from the mechanical mannequins of centuries past to today's corporate image ads disguised as kitsch diversions, have celebrated the status quo. The mechanical spectacles fabricated by the underground technologists profiled in this chapter question the underlying assumptions of mainstream engineering, consumer culture, the art world, and the rest of what Ross has called "the military-industrial-entertainment complex."

"We're just trying to do a theater with machines," says Pauline, as if to allay any fears. He flashes a toothy, conspiratorial grin. "You have to provide entertainment value."

Mark Pauline: Heavy Metal Theater of Cruelty

Mark Pauline has a firm handshake.

Which is remarkable, since his right hand has only three fingers, two of which are suspiciously stubby. Odd bumps pebble the heel of his hand; a wad of misshapen flesh bulges between his thumb and first digit. It is the hand of a monster, attached to a man.

Pauline's fingers are, in fact, not fingers at all, but transplanted toes. He lost three fingers and a thumb in 1982 while working on a rocket motor for one of his shows. The propellant exploded, hurling Pauline several feet. "I was lying on the ground and blood went in a sheet of red over my eyes," he recalls. "I . . . looked at my hand, 'cause [it] felt funny, and all I could see was the bones.""*

Surgeons were able to reattach one relatively undamaged finger, patch up the mangled palm with a flap of skin, and improvise new fingers with a pair of Pauline's toes. Pauline isn't as dexterous with his right hand as he used to be, but fortunately for him, he's left-handed. More recently, he and Joseph Rosen, a reconstructive plastic surgeon, have discussed the possibility-still science fiction-of one day replacing Pauline's maimed hand with that of a healthy donor. In another future imagined by Rosen, the artist would be fitted with a bionic limb whose microcircuitry would translate nerve impulses into electrical signals, allowdng Pauline to manipulate powerful robotic fingers as easily as he once moved his own.

Mark Pauline's saga has all the makings of a gothic horror story set in a grease-caked machine shop: a rogue technologist challenges the Fates and loses his right hand-the hand that symbolizes logic and rationality, in Jungian psychology-to a thunderbolt of divine retribution. He is a distant relative of Dr. Frankenstein, who only narrowly escaped death at the hands of the monster he jolted to life, and close kin to Rotwang, the industrial necromancer in Fritz Lang's Metropolis, whose black glove conceals a hand shriveled by some experiment gone horribly wrong.

He shares cultural DNA, as well, with Dr. Adder, the splatterpunk surgeon with the (literal) firearm in K. W. Jeter's cyber-horror novel of the same name. Adder sports a flashglove, a fearsome psychic blaster designed to be grafted onto the stump of a futuristic executioner, whose forearm must be amputated to accommodate it. He has been invaded, bodily, by technology. More and less than human, he straddles nature and the unnatural; his synthetic arm, like Ahab's whalebone peg leg, magnifies spiritual flaws even as it masks physical deformities. At one point, Jeter steps back from the narrative to consider the steely, death-dealing prosthetic hand as a "minor archetypal image of the twentieth century . . . representing [a] fascination with the artifacts of destruction, the desire to make them part of oneself, [and] the fear of those who have succeeded in that."^

Mark Pauline's art, which very nearly cost him his hand, documents such fears and fascinations. SRL spectacles address the interpenetration of meat and machinery that is central to cyberculture, underscoring Marshall McLuhan's perception that "technologies are self-amputations of our own organs." McLuhan argued that "physiologically, man in the normal use of technology (or his variously extended body) is perpetually

modified by it and in turn finds ever new ways of modifying his technology."^ Having extended ourselves through "auto-amputation," we become whole again by reintegrating our technologies into our physiologies: the toolmaker becomes one with his tools. "Man becomes, as it were, the sex organs of the machine world," McLuhan wrote, "enabling it to fecundate and to evolve ever new forms."^ The postmodern theorist Manuel De Landa takes up McLuhan's thread when he portrays the human technologists engineering machine evolution as "industrious insects pollinating an independent species of machine-flower that simply [does] not possess its own reproductive organs."^

Fittingly, Mark Pauline's first venture into mechanical performance was called Machine Sex (1979). Framing social commentary with absurdist humor, the artist critiqued the jingoism engendered by the late seventies oil crisis in mordant, existential terms. Dead pigeons dressed as Arabs were shredded by a spinning blade while the Cure's "Killing an Arab," a fashionably gloomy pop song inspired by Albert Camus's The Stranger, blasted at mind-numbing volume.

Pauline had moved to San Francisco in 1977, shortly after receiving an art degree from Eckerd College in St. Petersburg, Florida. Bored with the conventional art world, he had embarked on a series of creative defacements that involved altering billboards to reveal their subliminal messages. Billboard alteration, to Pauline, was media-smart anti-art-"a way for me to get ideas out in public . . . [where] more people would see [my] work than if it were in a little room with clean walls and perfect lighting and 'ambience.' '"^

He soon concluded, however, that billboard banditry didn't pack enough wallop. Casting about for a harder-hitting medium, he noticed the ready availability of broken-down or discarded machinery in the city's industrial district. "San Francisco at that point was in a state of industrial decay," recalled Pauline, in a Re/Search magazine interview. "I thought. That's it-there's all these places with abandoned machines. I know how to do technical, mechanical work. ... I know how to stage a theatrical performance-I learned that in school. . . . maybe it's possible to actually have some fun and really do something new.' "'°

A self-taught mechanic, Pauline had spent the years between high school and college working on semitrailers, building aircraft target robots and missile launchers at Florida's Eglin Air Force base, and welding pipe in