Survival Research Labs performed a brief show starting a little before 8 pm Wednesday night in the courtyard of the Berkeley Art Museum. The performance was part of a CIMAM (International Committee of ICOM (The International Council of Museums) for Museums and Collections of Modern Art) conference.
Below are a couple photos I took before, during, and after the show. I didn’t get many good pictures during the show, but I shot a couple minutes of video that came out quite well. I’ll post some of the video after I have time to edit it down a bit. Photos were hard to take during the show, as the scene varied from very dark to very bright. The rocket engine put out quite a large flame.
I took these photos before the show started. The bicycle was riding on top of a wire that ran across the courtyard. The huge spliff in the Smoke Bear’s mouth exploded during the show and the bear ended up kind of smashed up on the ground. A Jesus looking figure was flying below the bike in a Superman pose. You can see Hippie Jesus in the second photo, albeit a little fuzzily due to me having trouble keeping the camera steady during a long low-light exposure.
Inchworm, one of the bigger machines, started the show by crawling very animal-like across the courtyard and interacting with the Running Machine, one of the smaller machines. Most of that action was going on around the corner to the right where I couldn’t see it. Then, Big Arm, this machine with a really long articulating arm walked out and started spewing flames. A little later, one of the other machines started flaming. You can see the V1 to the left in both of these pictures. It’s the long horizontal tube.
Here’s the aftermath of the show soon after it ended. The remains of the bear are attached to the big plywood sheet up front. Note the huge Tesla coil in the background. It was making 20+ foot blue sparks during the show. The trees were covered with long sheets of aluminum foil. The Tesla coil and the foil made for lots of fun. The next pictures show the foil trees and the Tesla coil a little better.
Finally, here are some closer up photos of the crawling machines after the show. You can see most of the V1 on the left side of the first photo.
