Machines in Flames

In 1980s Toulouse, an elusive group began bombing computer companies. ‘CLODO’ disappeared after three years, without ever being caught or ever to be heard of again. Two film makers launch an investigation into CLODO, looking for answers, motivations and identities, but are soon frustrated by a collective that struck in the dead of night, leaving in their tracks only ashes and the sporadic line of cryptic graffiti. Machines in Flames is a meditation on computation, destruction, and the lure of archives.

The film is the debut work of the Destructionist International. It was first distributed through a network of self-erasing USB data sticks dropped outside corporate campuses.

The screening will be followed by a conversation with co-director Andrew Culp and Princeton sociologist Janet Vertesi.

Free admission! Sponsored by the Digital Due Process Clinic with support from a National Science Foundation award (#1848286). More about the film: https://machinesinflames.com/.

About the panelists:

Andrew Culp is Director of the MA Aesthetics and Politics Program and Professor of Media History and Theory at the California Institute of the Arts. His writing has been published in a dozen languages, including the books Dark Deleuze (Minnesota, 2016) and A Guerrilla Guide to Refusal (Minnesota, 2022). Machines in Flames is the first in a series of films made by The Destructioninst International.

Janet Vertesi is associate professor of sociology at Princeton University, a longtime ethnographer with NASA’s robotic spacecraft program, and a conscientious resistor to the personal data economy. Her attempts to keep her pregnancies (and children) shielded from data detection have gone viral, and her continuing “Opt Out” experiments catalogue a life lived embracing data sovereignty.