Bruce Sterling , a regular Wired contributor, is the editor of Mirrorshades , the definitive document of the cyberpunk movement. The Official SRL Site See what Mark and friends are up to. Another performance art group with a taste for mechanized destruction.
Life can be nasty, brutish, and short.
Mark Pauline's art makes the most of this. As head grease monkey of Survival Research Laboratories, Pauline orchestrates spectacularly savage machine performances in which robots built from industrial scrap and other dubiously acquired components wallop the crap out of anything that gets in their way. In July's Wired , Bruce Sterling treks down to Phoenix and catches the beasts in action. When I went to Phoenix to dwell in an unheated toxic cavern with the Survival Research Lab people, I caught a cough and fever that flattened me for three days afterward. I wrote most of this article on a laptop computer while shivering in my sickbed at home.