The Cinema of Too-Late Capitalism #2: ‘Machines in Flames’
When: Wednesday, November 18, 2026, 5:00 PM - 7:00 PM
Where: BLOC Cinema, ArtsOne Building, Mile End
Speaker: Thomas Dekeyser
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A screening of 'Machines in Flames’ by the film collective Destructionist International in conversation with director Thomas Dekeyser.
In 1980s Toulouse, an elusive group began bombing computer companies. Calling themselves CLODO, the group disappeared after three years, leaving behind no arrests, no clear identities, and few answers. Two filmmakers set out to investigate CLODO’s actions and motivations, but encounter a history shrouded in secrecy, punctuated only by the ashes of destroyed machines and sporadic traces of cryptic graffiti.
Join us at Queen Mary’s BLOC Cinema for a screening of Machines in Flames, an experimental short documentary by the film collective the Destructionist International. Following the screening, cultural geographer and director Thomas Dekeyser, author of Techno-Negative: The Long History of Refusing the Machine (2026), will be in conversation with political theorist Ignasi Torrent Oliva from the University of Catalonia.
Together, they will explore the politics of technological refusal, the significance of destruction as a political gesture, and the possibilities of negativity in an age of planetary technological domination. What does it mean to refuse the machine when technological systems increasingly organise the conditions of everyday life? Can destruction open up possibilities beyond the world it seeks to dismantle?
This is the second event in The Cinema of Too-Late Capitalism, a monthly SSE film series organised by Uygar Baspehlivan and Martin Coward at Queen Mary University of London’s School of Society and Environment.