Machines in Flames (2022, 50min) finds a secret history of destruction by following the footsteps of a clandestine group of French computer workers from the 1980s.

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. The film combines archival traces, a viral desktop choreography, and late-night video recordings of CLODO’s targets into a meditation on computation, destruction, and the lure of archives.

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Machines in Flames has been shown in over 60 venues, including film festivals, museums, political venues, hacker festivals, squats, and universities. Please contact us at aculp@calarts.edu and thomas.dekeyser@rhul.ac.uk to arrange screenings, for a press pack, or for any other information.

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Machines in Flames is the debut film of the Destructionist International, and the first in a series on the appetite for abolition in ultra-leftism.

The Destructionist International is an art-theory collective dedicated to the negative in all of its forms. It is driven by a shared inclination: a taste for the fury of destruction, away from the dull submission of situations to reasoned judgement. The group works across a variety of creative mediums (text, image, video, sound) and themes (militancy, sabotage, technology, liberation).

Direction and production: Thomas Dekeyser is a cultural geographer and filmmaker at the Centre for the GeoHumanities at Royal Holloway, University of London. He specialises in experimental films that dig into the complex politics of digital technologies, refusal, and militant histories.

Direction and production: Andrew Culp is a media theorist and maker at the California Institute of the Arts. His writing has been published in a dozen languages, including the books Dark Deleuze and A Guerrilla Guide to Refusal.

Sound production and voice-over: Dana Papachristou provided Machines in Flames with its unique moody sound composition and voice-over. She is a sound artist, multi-instrumentalist and musicologist, who (co-)founded Aesthate Research Centre and akoo-o, a collective active in walking, geo-location, sound, anthropology and media studies.