In San Francisco’s underground high-tech arts scene, Karen Marcelo is an icon. A computer programmer by day, she’s also a member of performance art group Survival Research Labs. SRL artists build robots with equipment they find in junkyards and military-industrial waste bins, setting them loose in a kind of anarchic frenzy with no practical purpose. This is technology for art’s sake.
Marcelo often plays the role of the hacker behind the art – coding software that allows people to control gun-shooting robots from remote locations over the web or developing user interfaces for remote-controlled sculptures. Her motivation is to create…
