Survival Research Labs, founded in 1978 by Mark Pauline, Eric Werner and Matt Heckert was the group that most directly and profoundly initiated the entire genre of modern machine art. Every battle-bot, junkyard war, exploding machine event and mechanical myth-busting sound bite owes this protean group and it’s grinning avatar Mark Pauline a tip O’ the hat. In the mid-90’s there was a lot of cross-over between SRL and Cacophony. The Kill Your TV event was a collaboration & Cacophony members were major collaborators on the Austin show:
The 5th annual “official” SantaCon. By this year, the “meme’ of this event had, for better or worse, taken off, escaping the mad-hatter clutch of Cacophony. Rev. Al and his Los Angeles crew added many unique and amusing SoCal twists to this already sorta tired annual event. Chief among them was the human wave “Santa Beduin” attack over the sand dunes of the Iron Pit” on the Venice Beach Boardwalk. Look for it in the video.
Chad Mulligan collected 500 TV’s with the help of Melmoth and M2. Then, he and 800 of his closest friends smashed, blew-up, eviscerated, skewered, drove through, stomped and generally beat the living crap out of those TV’s
