Mark Pauline's machine-performance group, which from 1978 staged spectacles of robotic destruction and called it the industrial performing arts · the clearest bridge between performance art and the industrial-music scene.
Survival Research Laboratories is the machine-performance group founded in San Francisco in 1978 by Mark Pauline, and the Bureau files it as the mechanical pole of the Performance sub-section, the point at which performance art is literally industrialised. Where Stelarc rebuilds the body as a machine, SRL removes the body from the stage altogether and lets the machines perform: custom-built robots, often remotely controlled, staged in spectacles of competition and destruction, with fire, explosives and the noise of heavy industry.
Pauline is credited as the originator of large-scale machine performance and the premier practitioner of what he called the "industrial performing arts", and across more than sixty performances in the US, Europe and Japan SRL built a body of work in which the machine is the performer and the human is the displaced operator. The themes are consistent: destruction as a form of survival, technology as an autonomous and faintly menacing force, and a dystopian reading of the industrial age staged as live spectacle. The performances have historically required audiences to sign waivers, which is a fair measure of their character.
The reason SRL belongs in this archive, rather than only in a performance-art one, is the company it kept. Pauline's work was conceived in direct collaboration with industrial musicians: Monte Cazazza, the Industrial Records associate who helped coin the founding slogan of industrial music, and Graeme Revell of SPK, whose own catalogue the archive files. SRL performed in industrial-scene contexts, including the Factrix "Night of the Succubus" event, and the group shares with the musicians a common pool of influences, J. G. Ballard's Crash chief among them, and a common preoccupation with the meeting of flesh and machine.
That makes SRL the clearest single bridge between performance art and the industrial-music scene the archive documents. The mechanised destruction of an SRL show is the visual and physical correlate of the sound SPK and the first wave were making: the same fascination with industry, breakdown and the machine, expressed through robots and fire rather than tape and metal percussion. The two practices grew in the same soil, and through Cazazza and Revell they were, for a time, the same circle.
The Bureau treats SRL on the documentary and connector tests rather than as a founding music act: it is filed because the industrial-music story cannot be fully told without the machine-performance practice that ran alongside it, and because the personnel overlap is real and documented. The group's later decades have continued the machine-performance form, but the filing rests on the founding San Francisco period and its industrial-scene ties.
A content advisory governs the entry, as across the sub-section: the work uses fire, explosives and heavy machinery, and the Bureau documents it as machine art rather than as anything to be imitated. SRL is filed as the industrialisation of performance itself, and as the mechanical wing of the transgressive-performance tradition the archive's sound grew up beside.