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SRL: Ghostly Scenes of Infernal Desecration

General, Trip Report August 16th, 2006

SRL Photo by Garth Webb
Image from Garth Webb via srl.org

ISEA 2006 was this past week in San Jose. I hadn’t been to San Jose in awhile. In fact, the last time I was there a friend of mine got arrested for felony possession of a juggling torch. So I’ve been kind of down on San Jose.

But the lure of SRL and boatloads of new media art was too much to resist, and the free passes I lucked into certainly helped.

The SRL show was great. I’d never seen them perform before, though I did get over to their shop a few days before on an errand and snuck a preview at some of the machines. The V1, Pitching Machine and Sparkshooter have to be my favourite machines, though it was pretty wild when the Shockwave Cannon started knocking leaves off the trees above the audience.

Most of the audience seemed to be there for the spectacle. I did feel there was a protest of mechanization and violence buried in the performance, and a certain love for the machines themselves. Usually in SRL shows there is violence but it’s only machines in the ring. This time there were two people inside a little car with oxyacetalene cannons on top driving among the robots. The most tense moments had to be when the car was hit by a two-by-four from the pitching machine (crushing one of the steel tubes on top) and when it was pushed directly against the barrel of the V1.

Check out more media on the SRL page for Ghostly Scenes of Infernal Desecration.

One Response to “SRL: Ghostly Scenes of Infernal Desecration”

  1. Michael Ang » ISEA Roundup Says:
    September 12th, 2006 at 9:06 pm

    [...] The SRL show was great. See my SRL show review. [...]

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