Oddball Films has the rare opportunity to present the fourth
annual installment in the innovative interview-based series MESS (Media Ecology Soul Salon) featuring Mark Pauline founder of the
Survival Research Laboratories. Los Angeles media artist and curator Gerry
Fialka will interview Pauline in person on the Oddball Cine Stage, with video
excerpts from 40 years of SRL performances.
Survival Research Laboratories, founded in 1978, is the innovator of
robot-based performance art and known for the most dangerous shows on
earth. So dangerous, in fact, that
recently the group was banned from performing in San Francisco. This rare and exciting interview will explore
the unique blending of performance and technology and the mind behind the
robotic mayhem.
Date: Friday October 12th,
film clips at 8PM, interview at 8:30 PM
Venue: Oddball Films, 275 Capp Street San Francisco
Admission: $10.00 in advance, $12.00 at the door. Limited Seating
RSVP to programming@oddballfilm.com
or
(415) 558-8117
Mark Pauline is an American performance
artist and inventor, best known as founder and director of Survival Research
Laboratories. He is a 1977 graduate of Eckerd College in St. Petersburg,
Florida. Pauline founded SRL in 1978 and it is considered the premier
practitioner of "industrial performing arts", and the forerunner of
large scale machine performance. SRL is known for producing the most dangerous
shows on earth. Although acknowledged as a major influence on popular
competitions pitting remote-controlled robots and machines against each other,
such as BattleBots and Robot Wars, Pauline shies away from
rules-bound competition preferring a more anarchic approach. Machines are
liberated and re-configured away from the functions they were originally meant
to perform.
Pauline has written of SRL, "Since its inception SRL has
operated as an organization of creative technicians dedicated to re-directing
the techniques, tools, and tenets of industry, science, and the military away
from their typical manifestations in practicality, product or warfare."
Since its beginning through the end of 2006, SRL has conducted about 48 shows.
In the summer of 1982, Pauline blew his hand off while experimenting with solid
rocket fuel. In August 1990, ArtPark, a state-sponsored arts festival in
Lewiston, New York, cancelled a Pauline performance when it turned out he
intended "to cover a sputtering Rube Goldberg spaceship with numerous
Bibles" that would "serve as thermal protective shields" and be
burned to ashes in the course of the performance. According to Pauline "I
like to make machines that can just do their own shows... machines that can do
all that machines in the science fiction novels can do. I want to be there to
make those dreams real."[3] Obtainium - The word obtainium likely
originated from but was most certainly popularized by SRL crew finding or
liberating discarded or obsolete items and re-directing them from industry,
science, and the military and re-purposing them for anarchic machine performances.
This event is a MESS (Media Ecology Soul Salon) -
The public is invited to these engaging interviews by Gerry Fialka with the
following modern thinkers who'll address the metaphysics of their callings and
the nitty-gritty of their crafts. http://www.laughtears.com/mess.html and
http://www.laughtears.com/
"Great interviewing requires a stimulating
interviewer and Gerry Fialka is certainly that. Best part is that he makes the
rare act of deep thinking in public before an audience flow as creatively and
easily as a Basquiat painting." - Jay Levin, LA Weekly founder and
former editor-in-chief
"My experience in Gerry Fialka's MESS series
was a scintillating discussion of history, culture, philosophy, sociology and
the creative process. His questions and ideas transcend the accepted,
traditional limitations of 'the interview.' " - Brad Schreiber, author,
producer, screenwriter, journalist
GERRY FIALKA, film curator, writer,
lecturer, and paramedia-ecologist has conducted interactive workshops at Cal
Arts, UCLA, MIT, USC, San Francisco's Yerba Buena Art Center, the Ann Arbor
Film Festival, Culver City High School, Massey University (New Zealand), and
more. His public interview series MESS has included the likes of Mike Kelley,
Alexis Smith, Abraham Polonsky, Mary Woronov, Paul Krassner, Ann Magnuson,
Heather Woodbury, Norman Klein, Chris Kraus, P. Adams Sitney, Hunter
Drohojowska-Philp, Kristine McKenna, John Sinclair, Van Dyke Parks, Orson Bean,
George Herms, Doug Harvey, Janet Fitch, Jon Rappoport, Brad Schreiber, Simon
Forti, Rudy Perez, Barry Smolin, SA Griffin, Bruce Bickford, Stan Warnow, Rip
Cronk, Marina Goldovskaya, Harry Northup, John French, Jon Alloway, Bill
Daniel, Phil Proctor, Ed Holmes (aka Bishop Joey), Marcy Winograd, Greg Burk, Kirk
Silsbee among many others. Fialka's interviews have been published in books by
Mike Kelley and Sylvere Lotringer. His William Pope.L interview is published in
the magazine ARTILLERY Jan'08 issue. Fialka's MESS retrieves the original 1970
MESS (McLuhan Emergency Strategy Seminar) with McLuhan, Buckminster Fuller, and
Ted Carpenter (They Become What They Behold) all of whom stressed that
breakdowns can be breakthroughs. Fialka has also interviewed Grace Lee Boggs,
Ondi Timoner, Timothy A. Carey, George Clinton, Colonel Bruce Hampton, Ben
Watson, Tom Gunning, Mac Rebennack (aka Dr John), Martha Colburn, tENTATIVELY a
cONVENIENCE, Bill Brand, Pip Chodoov, Craig Baldwin, DJ Spooky, ruth weiss, MA
Littler, Bill Morrison, Braden King, Bruce Langhorn and many more. Visit: www.venice
wake.org
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MESS (Media Ecology Soul Salon),
produced by Gerry Fialka since 1997, is based on Marshall McLuhan's insight:
"If you don't study the effects of technology, you become its slave."
And by "technology" McLuhan was referring to anything humans invent,
from language to computers, from philosophy to books, from toothpicks to
bulldozers. In dialogues with modern thinkers, MESS provides a forum for
probing both the form and the content of media, and for comprehensively
surveying-its services and disservices, avoiding bias or point of view. MESS is
percept-plunder for the recent future.
In his book "I, Fellini," Federico
Fellini wrote, "I don't mind speaking autobiographically because I reveal
less of myself talking about my real life than I do if I talk about the layer
underneath, the one of my fantasies, dreams and imagination." MESS peers
into the portals of discovering this layer. MESS seeks what lies beyond this
layer.
Participants -- including writers, artists,
filmmakers, musicians and activists -- are the early radar systems and
rear-view mirrors detecting how major transformations in technology affect us.
As we live in a MESS-age, this interactive series shakes people out of their
regular agendas and reality tunnels. MESS promotes mapmakers who search for new
lands and new data. MESS seeks meticulous understanding of every thing we see,
hear , feel, taste, and smell, passionately needling the somnambulists and
proving that learning can and must be fun. As McLuhan asked, "How are you
to argue with people who insist on sticking their heads in the in visible teeth
of technology, calling the whole thing freedom?" "Technologies are
not mere exterior ads," said Walter Ong, "but also interior
transformations of consciousness." And, in his book Immediatism, Hakim Bey
observed, "Simply to meet face-to-face is already an action against the
forces that oppress us by isolation, by loneliness, by the trance of
media." "If it works, it's obsolete." -- McLuhan. "Another
fine MESS." - Random Lengths News.
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"Gerry Fialka's MESS series is a unique
opportunity to meet special artists in a unique, intimate and revealing
setting. His intelligence and dedication to research leads to a stimulating and
highly interactive interview that is both entertaining and amazingly
enlightening." - Phil Proctor of the "Firesign Theatre"
"Gerry Fialka is very special, well prepared
and ready to take risks - I learned about my self! My kind of interviewer.
" -Martin Perlich, author THE ART OF THE INTERVIEW
"Gerry Fialka is willing to enter in new
discussions even if they go against his current views. Fialka's multilayered
delivery of ideas encourages the search for new questions and new paradigms
that extend beyond. He is well-informed, off-beat and articulate - one of the
most fascinating people I've met." - Keith Jeffries, Ascalon Films