Brinkley Warren
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Cosmic ↔ Social · Venture

MegaBots

2014–2017 · Silicon Valley / Oakland / Global

MegaBots

The world's first giant robot fighting league. Mark II: 15 feet tall, 12,000 pounds, Caterpillar skid-steer treads, pneumatic cannon, two pilots. A $550,000 Kickstarter in 2015. More than $7 million in venture funding, with backing from investors including Howard Schultz and Jerry Yang. A challenge issued to Japan's Suidobashi Heavy Industry, accepted within a week, fought in 2017 before an audience of millions. Guinness World Record: Largest Robots to Fight. A global media reach valued at over $220 million.

The work's aesthetic register is the Mecha Sublime—the experience of encountering your own childhood mythology made physically real at overwhelming scale. Not beautiful in the gallery sense. Not sublime in the Kantian sense. Something historically new: a thing that previously existed only in imagination and simulation, now present in three dimensions and firing giant projectiles. The feeling of your eight-year-old self being right.

This is the practice's most mass-scale work and its most collaborative: the engineering of co-founders Gui Cavalcanti and Matt Oehrlein is the enabling condition. Warren's contribution is the recognition that this is cultural production—the literalization of collective fantasy. It is art.

Gallery

Mark II in the Oakland warehouse.
Mark II in the Oakland warehouse.
Workshop build — fabrication in progress.
Workshop build — fabrication in progress.
Mark II outside Petco Park, San Diego.
Mark II outside Petco Park, San Diego.
Driving the Mark II through the streets of Oakland.
Driving the Mark II through the streets of Oakland.
MegaBots team with the Mark II.
MegaBots team with the Mark II.
Brinkley on the mic with the Mark II.
Brinkley on the mic with the Mark II.
Press shoot at the MegaBots HQ.
Press shoot at the MegaBots HQ.
Brinkley Warren — MegaBots co-founder, on-air.
Brinkley Warren — MegaBots co-founder, on-air.
Crowd gathered around the Mark II.
Crowd gathered around the Mark II.
MegaBots merch — zombie apocalypse tee artwork.
MegaBots merch — zombie apocalypse tee artwork.
Respirator on, fabrication underway beneath the Mark II.
Respirator on, fabrication underway beneath the Mark II.
Crewman atop the Mark II frame during shop build.
Crewman atop the Mark II frame during shop build.
Fabrication details — grinding, sparks, and pneumatic cannon assembly.
Fabrication details — grinding, sparks, and pneumatic cannon assembly.
MegaBots team with the finished Mark II.
MegaBots team with the finished Mark II.
Maker Faire Bay Area 2015 — Editor's Choice ribbon.
Maker Faire Bay Area 2015 — Editor's Choice ribbon.

Lineage — Survival Research Laboratories — Mark Pauline's machine-performance collective, founded in San Francisco in 1978, which pioneered large-scale robotic combat as performance art and established the danger, scale, and spectacle that MegaBots inherits. Behind SRL stands Jean Tinguely's self-destroying kinetic sculpture (Homage to New York, 1960) and Nam June Paik's robots (Robot K-456, 1964), the lineage of the machine staged as cultural actor rather than tool. MegaBots adds the register of Japanese mecha — Gundam, the giant-robot imaginary — pulled out of animation and simulation into physical reality.

Built with — Mark II — 15 feet, 12,000 pounds, Caterpillar skid-steer treads, pneumatic cannon, two pilots. Funded by Kickstarter and venture capital.

Press — CNN, Forbes, The Guardian, NBC, Popular Science, NPR, The Wall Street Journal, Top Gear, and others.