Here's a beautifully shot video profile of our friend Mark Pauline, founder of Survival Research Laboratories. Mark has been creating explosive robotic art performances for over 30 years.
This is Mark Pauline, and for 34 of his 58 years he’s built robots. They are not practical robots, not servile room-sweepers or toadying floor-moppers, but multi-ton monstrosities, feral machines of metal and fire birthed from his idiosyncratic imagination. Everywhere he looks he sees machines yoked to the banal — a jet engine, a backhoe, a pair of industrial movers — everyday technologies bored by their routines. He sees their potential, then sets to liberating it; he digs deep into the machines to discover what they really want to be.
A couple of minutes into the video there's a scene where Mark is being questioned by a firefighter about the crazy fires and explosions involved in the show. It's hilarious.
