Gadgetory

I've been doing this since 1978 and I'm 58 years old I was always very interested in technology even when there wasn't any I was interested in you know telling a story in a powerful way you know I had theater background and I knew that the people that really got away with murder literally in the case of the military or in the case of corporations I wanted to really borrow from their their successes in that way and so I decided to call it survival Research Laboratories and found it as a company several times a year we would do these large and increasingly larger demonstrations with a bunch of equipment out in parking lots or sometimes gas stations and a lot of times just completely unpermitted and really things that were as out of control as they could possibly be I think that it's important that they're professional people working to inject a sense of Anarchy into our day-to-day lives I think it's more important than it used to be we had like there was a Trojan horse it caught on fire the props who did some junkie in some movie properties we had a yeah we closed off poetry do this art show here that thing got caught on fire was the only thing that burned was just that one thing we did what happened was there was a jet engine that caught on fire wasn't a special effect we don't we don't use any pyrotechnics at all those are illegal when I was in high school that was when all that Weather Underground crazy stuff was going on I mean Bill Ayers was like my hero you know along with all those other crazy people the FBI said The Weather Underground organization which took credit for the bombing is the same radical group which was responsible for the bombing of the US Capitol in 1971 and the Pentagon in 1972 you know I wanted to grow up and be like that I wanted to be one of those people like burning down the banks and all that stuff you know they call them terrorists now back then they didn't call him that but you know I wanted to grow up and do that I want to grow up and fight the power and you know I ended up growing up and doing this instead I'm really banned from San Francisco I pled guilty to misdemeanor arson with intent to injure the public which is a terrorist charge that Ronald Reagan came up with after they burned down the Bank of America and Isla Vista the facts on the ground are that technically it's legal and it's not that big of a deal but somehow it just seems a lot of times because people really get bent out of shape you know for instance this huge burning prop got blown by a giant gust of wind that started in the middle of a show and it blew this burning debris into a crowd of people but one person got a very slight burn on their face I caused a little panic but the police just the FIR their first instinct was to seize all my machines and they didn't like someone didn't like the mr. Satan head that started the fire and so they fined me six thousand six hundred sixty six dollars and sixty six cents or they weren't going to give me the machines back they were gonna keep them we're doing something right in two senses because on the one hand we still have a reputation of being really out of control and crazy but on the other hand we're doing it in a safe enough way that nobody can point to any any injuries that have happened because of what we so and I think that's a good balance I got ahold of a whole descriptive manual on how to make test batches of rocket fuel for from Morton Thiokol and it was the real thing like real space shuttle feel like the chemicals you need how to test it how to test the sensitivity I was like wow this is cool I just remember I went up in the air and I remember looking up and seeing the roof which was about 13 feet up and I remember it seemed really close and then I landed on my back and then I looked at my hand and it was just bones and then I just blood what I couldn't see cuz my face was covered with blood because I had rocket fuel tore my face up the doctor said you know guy like you we can help you out and so he hooked me up with this other hospital where they were doing micro surgery research on digits and they for free they put two toes on my hand and so that's how the GIMP and came to be a reality so this is the spine robot here this is the most recent addition to the srl family of machines and robots it's Doctor Octopus or whatever his name was his things didn't really work ever but this is an actual functioning version of that I'm 16 hours a day you know I go home and hang out with my family for a few hours I'll usually come back at night and work till midnight I do that five times four or five times a week and so that's how I do it because I have to fund all this stuff too I'm the guy that if you see me walk into your company you know that it's the end I buy tech companies when they're having a hard time and I sell all their assets I also buy excess assets from all these big companies like Genentech and the BAE Systems Intel and all these companies I'm known around here as the guy to go to if you want to have someone look at your stuff make you a cash offer on the spot San Francisco is transitioning from a manufacturing kind of base to you know to high-tech and so what happened was there's all these factories that were just abandoned with full machine shops and complete storerooms full of equipment I went into one of them I was like this is a magazine you know it's like they like walked out here one day and left all the equipment in here and I was like holy and I was like wait a minute these places are all over the city from 78 to 1992 they were the last ones went away in 92 and so you know I would go out a couple times a week and just load I never got arrested so I must not have been doing anything wrong and that's where all this equipment came from yeah by hook or by crook you're rummaging through the pockets of billionaires because they just need to get rid of their junk and if you know how to play it right you can there's just endless streams of money in the Bay Area you know so being a parasite here is a good good place to be we got a bunch of stuff from Pixar things from their projection rooms and stuff and then last week somebody bought one like that I paid 50 bucks for some one from Pixar I was like oh someone bought it for 1,300 bucks it was this rackmount PD rackmount audio thing and I looked and it was like somebody in Emeryville from Pixar where they came from and I was like no you're kidding me we had a couple times with the Defense Department called us the people from the place that sold at us accidentally they were do panicking on the phone we had to take pictures of a bunch of weird stuff that looked like it might have come from them we had to bring those pictures there to look like we were cooperating and then we had to bring some stuff back there they destroyed it in front of the unnamed federal people I'm 58 and I have no regrets I said is this you know should I really be doing this and I thought about for a while I was like you know what what else am I gonna do my ultimate fantasy about what people should take away from these shows is that when someone who's been to a show is on their deathbed the images from an SRL show or some of the last things that are crossing the path of their mind before they expire if you can get into people's minds so that you're one of the last things they think of before they die then you've really done it so that's always been my goal but I can't prove that that happened