Exit Art curator Papo Colo calls this kind of artist a cultural provocateur. It's about living by your wits, politically aware, inventing a new world.
Several works have that post-apocalyptic approach to machines.
One of Robert Chambers' outsized sculptures, assembled from found industrial parts, is a giant fan wheel that viewers can pump so the blades spin and create a loud metallic scraping sound. Chico MacMurtries, a San Francisco artist who worked with Mark Pauline and who has recently relocated to New York, presents a group of rusty, computer-driven robots who perform a mechanized, sexualized danse macabre. Green's simple installation memorialized his failed attempt to establish The Free State of Caroline in the South Pacific, a country that would welcome the disenfranchised of the world. Keith Sanborn's installation includes a projection of a reworked Kennedy assassination film, in which Sanborn plays Moroccan celebratory music along with his colorized and altered clips from the Zapruder footage. For his symbolic installation titled The Holy Land, Yucef Merhi buried computer serial ports in a Torah and a Koran, connecting them with barbed wire.