Outfitted with flamethrowers, the radio-controlled,

monster-sized walking machines torch piles of broken

pianos as a 16-foot Tesla coil spurts crackling blue

sparks. A huge air cannon blasts away at plate glass

windows before turning ominously, to onlookers who are already suffering from the din of a V- 1 jet engine wailing nearby. Legless robo-soldiers crawl from the belly of a two-story Trojan horse as a hovercraft, propelled by four 4-foot-long pulsejet engines, glides chaotically across the burning asphalt. These scenes from a nightmare are real, and this theater of cruelty has a name: Survival Research Laboratories.

Founded in 1978 by Mark Pauline, Survival Research Laboratories is a San Francisco-based network of engineers, artists, hackers, and makers who create “spectacular mechanical performances” where “humans are present only as audience or operators.”

“The real message of machines isn’t that they’re helpful workmates,” says Pauline, cleaning the fingernails on his three-fingered right hand. (Part of his hand was blown off in 1982 by a DIY rocket engine. Two of his toes were later attached as replacement digits.)

“Like any extension of the human psyche, machines are scary things,” he says. "When you take the scary human psyche and magnify it hundreds or thousands of times with technology, it’s really nightmarish.”

At an early show, a steel exoskeleton mechanically reanimated a dead rodent while a live guinea pig controlled a large walking machine. At another performance, the giant spring-loaded Hand O’ God cocked itself with 8 tons of force before flicking a house of glass to the ground. Meanwhile, the Sparkshooter spewed molten metal 500 yards across the mechanical war zone.

We’ll Pay You to Kill! Right now, however, these mechanical beasts and their brethren are resting inside a dim machine shop where Pauline works in solitude. Wearing oil-stained mechanic's overalls and

horn-rimmed glasses, he blends into the mills, drill presses, wire spools, and cartons of unidentifiable raw materials filling every nook. The faint sounds of disco play in the background. Curiosities — doll parts, kitschy posters, vintage prosthetic limbs — hang alongside unusual industrial signs and remnants of surreally comedic props from previous shows.

Pauline’s office — until recently his bedroom — overflows with engineering trade magazines, illegible notes, battery chargers, a restaurant-grade espresso machine, piles of work clothes, and cobwebs. A massive poster of dystopian novelist J.G. Ballard looms over a tattered leather sofa. Ballard, who infamously fetishized car wrecks in his novel Crash, once defined robotics as “the moral degradation of the machine.” Unsurprisingly, Ballard was one of Pauline’s main inspirations when he founded SRL in 1978.

Fresh out of art school, Pauline relocated to the San Francisco Bay Area from his native Florida. Immersed in the burgeoning punk scene, he staged prankster attacks on corporate culture and complacency by modifying billboards in clever but acidic ways. In one widely reported stunt, he altered an Army recruitment sign emblazoned with the slogan “We’ll pay you to learn a skill!” to read “We’ll pay you to kill!” But for Pauline, the infamy was too short-lived to satisfy his calling in life as a creative troublemaker.

“I learned in art school that if you wanted to do something that no one had ever done before, if you wanted to create a truly new idea, you had to be lucky and very dedicated,” he says. “Out of that challenge came SRL.”

In November of 1978, Pauline, disillusioned with guerrilla billboard art, realized that “the techniques, tools, and tenets of industry, s_>cie_>nce,