Escape Velocity

by Mark Dery

  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, allowing 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.”5

  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.”6 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.”7 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.”8

  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.’”9

  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.’”10

  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 the Santa Barbara oil fields. Unlike many artists, he felt an affinity with technology. “Creative people have never had this kind of industrial equipment and machinery; it’s always been denied them,” he told an interviewer. “It’s all tied in with . . . this idealistic, romantic 19th century notion that creative people are these frail, delicate, spiritual shells that are about to flit away and evaporate at any minute, lest we turn our backs on their pitiful, washed-out efforts. So another part of my intention was to disavow that notion and do something really intense. Today, the main option people have for expressing themselves powerfully is through machines.”11

  Machine Sex caught the attention of San Francisco’s avant-garde community. In 1982, Matt Heckert became a member of SRL, followed shortly thereafter by Eric Werner. Heckert was a self-taught mechanic who had logged long hours hot-rodding the family car; Werner had worked at oil fields in Wyoming and aerospace firms in Orange County, California. Both had attended the San Francisco Art Institute.

  From 1982 until 1988, the trio staged thirteen confrontational, increasingly ambitious stunts. (In ’87 and ’88, respectively, Werner and Heckert left SRL to pursue solo careers.) A Cruel and Relentless Plot to Pervert the Flesh of Beasts to Unholy Uses (1982), which took place in San Francisco, crossed an antivivisectionist’s worst nightmare with a taxidermist’s wildest dream. The show made dramatic use of the “organic robots” that have earned SRL the undying wrath of animal rights activists: the grotesque Mummy-Go-Round, a carousel fitted with desiccated animal cadavers, the maws of its mummified riders frozen in silent snarls, and a machine incorporating the remains of a dog, mounted on an armature and anchored to a radio-controlled cart. Actuated, the dog-machine lunges forward, its head spinning in ghoulish imitation of cartoon violence.12

  “The use of dead animals started out as a vaccine to keep audiences from strolling down that easy road of Disneyfication that beckons whenever they see any kind of mechanical puppet show,” explains Pauline. “It’s distinctive because you know it isn’t putty or rubber, unlike Hollywood gore, which is the only other place people see special effects that remind them of the delicacy of the human form turned inside out.”

  Deliberately False Statements: A Combination of Tricks and Illusions Guaranteed to Expose the Shrewd Manipulation of Fact (1985), also mounted in San Francisco, was a gleeful Armageddon. The Screw Machine, a fourteen-hundred-pound radio-controlled robot, scooted along on corkscrew treads, seizing hapless devices with its hydraulic arm and dashing them to the ground with screw-popping force. The Walk-and-Peck Machine, designed and built by Heckert, scuttled about on beetle legs and spiked wheels, raining blows on other machines with its bird-beaked armature. Dragging himself shudderingly forward on spidery metal arms, the Sneaky Soldier conjured the image of a dying GI, disemboweled by a land mine, with horrifying realism.

  Misfortunes of Desire: Acted Out at an Imaginary Location Symbolizing Everything Worth Having (1988), described by Pauline as “SRL’s Paradise Lost,” was held in the parking lot of New York’s Shea Stadium. Set against a hastily erected Eden replete with palm trees and flowerbeds, the show made use of the one-ton Walking Machine, an enormous, crate-shaped, four-legged rover. The twenty-foot-long Inchworm, a nasty-looking vehicle whose saber-toothed ja
ws give it the look of a giant Venus flytrap, was also featured. When the pace threatened to drag, a flamethrower that spat forty-foot tongues of fire kept things lively. From time to time, a Shock Wave Cannon let loose with a thunderous boom that shook windows and jiggled innards.

  The events staged by SRL are war games in the literal sense-a combination of killing field and carnival midway, meant to explode media myths about surgical strikes and collateral damage in an entertaining fashion. Always oblique, often open-ended, Pauline’s Circus Machinus lends itself to multiple, sometimes contradictory interpretations. It does not so much critique our relationship with technology as crystalize it. SRL’s theater of operations can be seen as a meditation on the gamelike nature of military strategy, an object lesson in the theatrical unreality of war, or a black comedy about arms proliferation. Partaking equally of the madhouse and the fun house, SRL performances produce a queasy mixture of horror and hilarity. “I make weapons to tell stories about weapons,” says Pauline. “SRL shows are a satire of kill technology, an absurd parody of the military-industrial complex.”

  He and his dozen-odd, mostly male coworkers have stockpiled an arsenal in the machine shop where they live and work, on the outskirts of San Francisco’s Mission District. One device, an electromagnetic rail gun, can liquefy a metal bar and send the molten blob streaking through the air, to explode on impact. “SRL’s answer to George Bush’s call for ‘a thousand points of light,’” the artist deadpans.

  SRL is at work on human-sized robots called Swarmers whose group behavior is governed by an artificial life program running on their onboard computers. The program, which the SRL software engineer Raymond Drewry based on code written by MIT programmers, is similar to those used to create “flocking” effects in computer animation-schools of fish, clouds of falling leaves. To date, SRL has completed four Swarmers-the minimum number required for the robots to exhibit emergent behavior. Each is equipped with an emitter-detector device; the program instructs it to move toward whichever machine is nearest, but as soon as it’s within a certain distance of the other Swarmer, it beats a hasty retreat. Pauline describes the aggregate effect as “this weird behavior where they clump together, swarming around.” He calls the manic machines “a response to the increased influence mob behavior has had in world events.”

  The Low-Frequency Generator, a mobile, radio-controlled, reaction jet engine, is modeled after the V-1 buzz bomb whose banshee shriek struck terror in Londoners during World War II. “We ran it and people heard it almost twelve miles away,” says Pauline, with relish. “They had stories on the evening news asking anybody with information about the strange reverberations felt throughout the Bay Area to call the police. You can stand next to this thing and what it does to your brain is just. . . sublime. You feel as if there are rats in your chest. It shakes your eyeballs so much that they black out and come on again forty-five times per second, creating a strobe effect. It’s the sort of phenomenon that doesn’t exist anywhere else on Earth.”

  Shortly after the Persian Gulf War, SRL built a teleoperated high-pressure air launcher that uses a blast of pressurized CO2 to shoot a projectile with brute force. Teleoperation, defined by the technology journalist Howard Rheingold as “the human experience of seeing out of the eyes of a machine, and using natural gestures to direct machines to manipulate the physical world,” was developed for military applications such as remote-controlled weaponry and industrial uses in undersea oil rigs, nuclear power plants, and other environments hostile to human workers.13 When a tele-operator moves his computer-tracked head, the head of a distant robot “slaved” to his motions swivels correspondingly; when the operator gestures with hands clad in motion-sensing virtual reality gloves, the robot’s manipulators move in tandem.

  The operator of SRL’s air launcher wears a lightweight armature that rests on his shoulders; its visor is equipped with two Hi8 video camera viewfinders that fit into the operator’s eyes with eyecups, immersing the operator in a stereoscopic projection of what two video cameras mounted on the barrel “see.” The headmount is connected to a servo system that enables the barrel of the launcher to follow the wearer’s head movements.

  “The machine fires a beer can filled with concrete, about eighty grams of high explosive, and a contact detonator at about 550 feet per second,” says Pauline. “You’ve got an ergonomic controller that allows you to push these buttons that you feel with the sweep of your thumb, locking the gun down once you’ve acquired the target. There’s a crosshair at your focal point about four feet away and when you line up the target with that, you fire, and it just obliterates it.”

  Prolonged submersion in the air launcher’s headmounted viewing system gives rise to the experience known as “telepresence,” the out-of-body sensation that occurs when the gap between sense perception and simulated reality (or, in this case, live video images of the actual surroundings) is sufficiently narrow that the user is convinced that he is there–immersed in the virtual world (or one with the remote-controlled device). “The depth perception is incredible, and once you get all the adjustments right, you just sink into it,” says Pauline. “You start to imagine your body in different ways, just like you do when you’re in an isolation tank; [the technology] becomes transparent because of the comfort level, which is the key feature in any of these input devices. Once you achieve transparency, interesting things start to occur. It doesn’t take much, because the mind is . . . actively trying to meld with anything. . . . The virtual reality display couples the operator more closely to the machine. It feels like your head is mounted on the machine, like you’re riding on top of the missile.”

  In SRL performances, the gun-mounted video cameras project the view to a kill seen by the goggle-equipped teleoperator onto a large screen positioned near the audience. The green phosphor imagery relayed by cameras mounted on smart bombs during the Gulf War comes immediately to mind. Watching “the pornography of destruction through [SRL’s] eyes” (Pauline’s words), spectators are reminded of their wartime role as living room voyeurs, and of the numbing unreality of history’s first “virtual” war-a made-for-TV miniseries introduced by punchy logos and pumped-up, martial music reminiscent of trailers for Hollywood blockbusters.

  “I’m going to use the air launcher for lectures,” says Pauline. “I’ll show how it could be used to destroy the federal infrastructure in the same way that they talked about destroying the infrastructure of Iraq.” A tight, mirthless smile flits across his face. “It’s a prank.”

  If so, it’s a prank in the Molotov cocktail sense of the word, a gag designed to blow up in society’s face. In Pauline’s hands, rail guns, Swarmers, low-frequency generators, and teleoperated air launchers are actors in a dark farce that has grim fun with the notion of a bloodless “smart” war sold to the American public by a dukes-up president and a cheerleading media.

  The Persian Gulf War was portrayed, at the time, as an unmitigated success brought about by high-tech weaponry. “From a technological point of view,” writes John A. Barry, “the war was a testing ground for ‘smart weapons’ such as the Patriot and Tomahawk missiles that had never been tested in battle and were in danger of losing funding from the Pentagon. Their apparent success under actual fighting conditions breathed new life into them and prompted commentators to note that this war was also the first ‘technology war.’”14

  Unfortunately, the official reading was later exposed as a Nintendo fantasy. The bulk of the damage done to the enemy was inflicted not by “Scud-busting” Patriots but by disappointingly “dumb” bombs. John R. MacArthur, who calls the smart/dumb discrepancy “one of the biggest untold stories of the Gulf war,” reports that after the war

  the Air Force announced that laser- and radar-guided bombs and missiles made up just 7 percent of all U.S. explosives dropped on Iraq and Kuwait. The other 93 percent were conventional “dumb” bombs, dropped primarily by high-flying B-52s from the Vietnam era.15

  Nonetheless, as MacArthur noted on WNYC radi
o’s May 16,1993, broadcast of On the Media program, “If you watched the coverage-such as it was-you got the impression that every bomb was a smart bomb hitting a machine.” TV’s portrayal of the Gulf War as a video game in which Patriots knocked Scuds out of the air and laser-guided missiles blew up the built environment recalls the World War II propaganda cartoon Victory through Air Power. Created for the Department of Defense by Disney, the animated short was intended to demonstrate the effectiveness of large-scale strategic bombing. The critic James Agee was disturbed by its portrayal of warfare as a bloodless struggle between anthropomorphized weaponry:

  I noticed, uneasily, that there were no suffering and dying enemy civilians under all those proud promises of bombs; no civilians at all, in fact. . . . this victory-in-a-vacuum . . . is so morally simple a matter . . . of machine-eat-machine.16

  A little less than half a century later, the fantasy of trading in the grimy, disorderly bedlam of war for a “morally simple” clash between good and evil automata bubbled up again, in official fictions about a “clean” war. Unfortunately, the Gulf War was anything but clean when viewed up close: The deadly rain of bombs that buried fleeing Iraqi troops on the Basra road, shortly before the cease-fire, left a thirty-mile column of crumpled vehicles and flame-broiled corpses.

  The argument is sometimes made that a war fought entirely by machines would save human lives. When I asked MIT roboticist Rodney Brooks if he was troubled by the possibility, however remote, that his machines might end up on a robotic battlefield, he voiced this very opinion. “A battle fought entirely by robots would be sort of nice, wouldn’t it?” said Brooks. “It seems a much more humane way of settling differences. There’s certainly interest in any way of conducting battle that limits casualties on our side, which is a very humanistic point of view from the perspective of the brass.”