Equivocality

Boom fucking boom. That’s the sound of a V1 rocket engine igniting. A huge orange flame shoots out the end of the big rusty tube. I run out of the workshop and put my earplugs in to watch. It’s loud. I think I heard someone say it’s 150 decibels. The ground is shaking. You can feel it in your feet. After a few seconds, Mark Pauline shuts the rocket off.

A blonde in dark blue overalls looks up at the high ceiling, sees white flakes slowly floating down all through the enormous warehouse. “We shook the feathers loose from the rafters,” she says, and we all turn around and go back to work at Survival Research Laboratory’s temporary workshop at Robodock 2007.

I’m making bullets. I’m a one man precision munitions factory for an improbable show. Incredibly, the bottled water supplied by the event organizers fits perfectly into the barrel of the air cannon. So I’m cutting the bottles in half and pouring plaster into each one, using a wooden jig to leave a hole for the flare. We’re going to be firing live signal flares embedded in plaster slugs at 500 miles per hour at a huge plywood set. This is normal for SRL. I’m excited because I’m going to be on the gun crew, a reward for days of finicky work.

Somehow this is art. There’s just isn’t any other suitable word for performances with home-made yet quite useless industrial machines.

There’s a sudden roar and cloud of dust, and everyone rushes off again. Fire and sound always attract attention, and doubly so here, because it’s always something cool. Moths, one of the Flaming Lotus Girls called them, referring to the crowd attracted by their pyro test last night. This time, the moths are running towards a large round horizontal ring topped by a platform. A man is standing on the platform, operating the controls. It’s a home-made flying machine. The whole thing is hovering a meter or so above the ground, suspended by two huge counter-rotating propellers. The pilot/engineer’s name is David and he’s from Australia. I heard him talking earlier about how he’s trying to find a small jet engine for the next version. He wants to fly higher too, but his wife won’t let him.

“What the hell is all this smoke?” asks my friend Justin, walking into the huge empty warehouse. I explain that’s it’s dust kicked up by the flying machine. “Shit,” he says, “I missed it.” But it will fly again. Meanwhile, we have work to do. He’s working for Robochrist Industries for this festival, the machine/performance art group of Christian Ristow. He and Christian and six others built a giant mechanical robot arm over the last two weeks, almost entirely from scrap metal. It’s hydraulically powered and controlled by a home-made robotic glove, welded out of scrap and wired with cables salvaged from the derelict cranes running overhead in this ancient shipyard. I was working on the wiring yesterday, after which we had our first successful test. It’s an insane feeling of power to control a twenty-foot long forearm and hand, each minute wrist and finger motion translated into thousands of pounds of metal force by the creaking, leaking hydraulics. I’m giggling.

“I want to crush something,” I tell Justin. “Can we get a car or something?”

“Sure! The organizers found us a couple old cars,” Justin tells me. “We’ll crush them tomorrow.”

The hand sits outside the main building on the cracked asphalt of the old yard. To the right is the Serpent Mother, a beautiful metal snake in stainless steel and fire, a year’s work by 100 members of the Flaming Lotus Girls. It’s as beautiful as Survival Research Labs is loud.

To the left is the Large Hot Pipe Organ, a forest of enormous rusty pipes of different lengths, standing vertically. It’s MIDI controlled and capable of a range of percussive sounds from sighs to thunderous bangs; they were testing it late last night but the organizers asked them to stop, for fear of waking people up all over Amsterdam. Behind me, there’s the “piano bar”, a ring of pianos attached together in a large circle and slowly rotating, barstools and all. On the side of the main warehouse, Taiko drummers are practicing on their huge round drums, suspended fifty feet in the air. Inside, there’s a giant white fabric helium balloon that looks like a pillow or a cloud. Behind that, a bar is decorated with fire-breathing dragons. Huge metal girders have been welded together into multi-story structures in one corner; in the center the French robotic band La Machine is rehearsing for their Symphonie Mechanique, banging their instruments as their creators test and debug.

A performance troupe in bright jester-like costumes is choreographing something off to one side. A crew of five people have been shrink-wrapping old furniture in white plastic for the last week; as of yet I have no idea why. There’s some sort of video art project with a huge projector and re-purposed television sets. Riggers fly from cranes and the air is filled with the flash and sizzle of welding. Much of the art at Robodock is built on-site from scrap in the weeks before the opening. That opening is in one hour, and the joint is jumping.

Caroline of the Flaming Lotus Girls stands next to me at the sink, washing god-knows-what off her hands.

“Are you ready to run tonight?” I ask her.

“Yup, all ready.”

“What time?”

“7:00, 8:30, and 12:15,” she says, consulting a list of times written in sharpie on her hand. I watch her walk away, and wish I had my nomex jumpsuit in my luggage. It’s fireproof. That would be handy around here, and I’d fit right in.

For more photographs, see the Robodock gallery.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 19th, 2007 at 9:07 am and is filed under Blog-like. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.