He has little reason to care. He’s married now, with a son. He may not be quite what he once aimed for — as he put it, an artist with a CEO’s salary — but he’s got much of what he needs. He strips companies of their old or surplus technology and resells it; that funds his real work with SRL. In August he put a show on eBay: for $149,000.00 (plus proper permitting and a viable site with adequate electrical power), Survival Research Labs will bring its mechanized mayhem to your city. Thanks in part to some positive media coverage, he’s had over 7,000 views, but no one’s yet taken him up on the offer. "I just thought it would be fun. It was something I’d always wanted to do. Good for laugh. That’s why I usually do things. That’s my main motivation — I might get a laugh out of it somewhere down the line."

Down the line. Some time in the future, where Mark Pauline has always focused. "I’m 58 and I have no regrets. Yet. I figured that my chances of having regrets are diminished because I’ve made it this far. The percentages look good." He doesn’t look back much. "At this point I don’t really spend much time thinking about the past," he says, "I haven’t gotten to that point. Not to say that I won’t someday." And he’s got time, a long-lived family. "I might be doing this for another 40-50 years. It’s reasonable to assume that," he says.

And what would make all those long days and nights worth it? What has he been trying to do with this long project he’s made of his life?

"I do this stuff cause I like to do it," he says, "not because I think I’m going to make any money at it. I’ve been doing it for 30-some years and I still haven’t made any money at it. So that’s good. That means I’ve succeeded. That measure of success has been achieved."

The point is to make an impression, to shake people out of their default modes, if only for a moment. "My ultimate fantasy about what people should take away from these shows," he says, "is that when someone who’s been to a show is on their deathbed, the images from an SRL show are some of the last things that are crossing the path of their mind before they expire."

He can’t prove it’s ever happened. But he does remember a moment from one recent show. He was using the Spine Robot to pluck dead coyotes from another machine. "I was operating that for most of the show, and I grabbed a coyote and threw it toward the audience," he says. "I saw it land in a puddle and splash this 13-year-old girl, splashed this muddy water all over her. And she just looked horrified at first, then she just started laughing." Then he imagines her thinking back to that muddy water and that dead coyote in front of her. As she herself dies. The 13-year-old on the cusp of adolescence, trying to figure out the world, and a message as comically inscrutable as physics and an airborne coyote, mummified and suddenly splashing down at her feet, the work of some benevolent prankster-artist. What else could she do but laugh?

Maker Faire footage courtesy of Dylan Tweney.

SRL show image above:

Walker vs Inchworm at the "Illusions of Shameless Abundance" show, San Francisco May 28, 1989. Photo by Sixth Street Studios.