True Films 3.0 - Kevin Kelly

Survival Research Laboratories:
10 Years of Robotic Mayhem
Who wouldn’t want to see machines destroy other machines? Long
before Battle Bots, Terminator and the Matrix series, Mark Pauline and his
collective of avant-garde engineers have been staging demolition derbies
featuring custom built mechanical monsters. They spit fire, explode,
squash metal, whack off parts and grind each other up – within feet of
onlookers packed into a parking lot or highway underpass. The aim is to
create danger and provoke the audience out of its passivity. This compendium
of four past performances is the best of their influential grunge
theater and robotic art.
By Jonathan Reiss
2004, 60 min.
Available from Amazon
Rent from Netflix
A sonic cannon blows down a shack (below left). The audience cowers as the sonic cannon
is turned on them (right). Machines eat machines (bottom).
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