In 1980s Toulouse, an elusive group called CLODO 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 took place on April 24, 2025 at Cornell Cinema and was followed by a discussion with co-director Andrew Culp, Princeton sociologist Janet Vertesi, and Marc Aidinoff.
(1) Watch the movie on YouTube (50 min; free)
(2) Listen to the discussion (1:02:52)
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.
Marc Aidinoff is postdoctoral associate at the Department of Science & Technology Studies at Cornell University.
Funding and Support
Supported by the Department of Science and Technology Studies and the Digital Due Process Clinic with support from a National Science Foundation award (#1848286).