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See the Photos here: Survival Research Labs has been stunning audiences for 20 years. This performance art group, led by enigmatic founder Mark Pauline, deliberately pushes the limits of safety and sanity with large-scale robotic destruction. Audiences are assaulted by a (mostly) choreographed dance of machines spewing fire, water, snot and other substances while destroying some helpless sculpture or some other socially relevant symbol. Check out their site for details:
On Saturday, January 21 from 8:00pm to 8:15pm, SRL woke up Los Angeles' Chinatown district with a small and smoothly operated assault to the senses. Here is what I can figure out of the story: Fish boy (a wooden boy with lots of fresh fish stapled to him) had a bad dream. He lay sleeping on his school desk while he dreamed of being a giant crocodile. Sneaky soldiers crawled towards him. The Boeing flame thrower hurled 20 foot streams of hell at the croc. The croc head shook and spun in convulsions as a spike jabbed at the sleeping fish boy. The shaker bot, thinly disguised as a tiki head, attacked the fish boy and the croc. Suddenly, the running machine appeared and attacked the audience (well it wasn't supposed to be a real attack, but it did smash through the safety fence). Then the sonic fury that is the hovercraft was unleashed. The audience bore the brunt of the four 150 decibel pulse jet engines as the hovercraft floated around the parking lot. All of a sudden, the snot machine spurted icky goop and fish. Then three oil drums full of water, fish and tiny effigies exploded, splashing parts of the crowd. Finally, the croc vomited its own nastiness, and then collapsed onto the rather torched and soaked fishboy. Fifteen minutes later, people returned to their regularly scheduled reality. |
