Who’s afraid of Mark Pauline?

Mark Pauline is the Gepetto of a fleet of dangerous robots, and, depending on his mood, all he really wants to do is point them in your general direction.

As the leader of Survival Research Laboratories—a cadre of Bay Area counterculture machinists and engineers who create the loudest and most ferocious performance art ever to feature a menagerie of unhinged machines—Pauline’s business has been, for decades, making his audience thrillingly uncomfortable. 

Cintra Wilson spent a day roaming Pauline’s workshop and came back with a profile of a genius artist with a mechanical menagerie ready to be set loose. So why isn’t anyone asking him to come out and play?