Watch Destructionist International (Thomas Dekeyser and Andrew Culp) explore Machines in Flames, an experimental film about an investigative search for ‘CLODO’ — a group that started bombing computer firms in 1980s Toulouse, only to disappear 9 attacks later without ever being found. Journeying through their investigative folders, extensive digital maps and late-night video recordings of CLODO's targets, in this talk the artist-researchers present learnings from their deep-dive into the historical and contemporary lives of anti-computation assault. They trace the limits of archival research, and ask whether they ended up reproducing the very logic of policing that CLODO so feverishly sought to dismantle. What would an ‘anti-archive’ look like? 

Screen Walks is a series of live-streamed artist/researcher-led explorations of online spaces and artistic strategies designed to illuminate a thriving – often overlooked – digital cultural scene. A new online collaboration between The Photographers’ Gallery, UK and Fotomuseum Winterthur, Switzerland. 

Biography

The Destructionist International is 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. This passion helps DI maintain a militant indifference toward individuals, organization, and institutionalization of any kind. It owes its existence to radical events, those rare situations in which abolition becomes actual.

The Destructionist International works across a variety of creative mediums (text, image, video, sound) and themes (militancy, sabotage, technology, liberation). Its first work was the film Machines in Flames, in which media scholar Andrew Culp and cultural geographer Thomas Dekeyser retraced the footsteps of CLODO’s historic attacks on computer firms in the 1980s.

Thomas Dekeyser is a cultural geographer and filmmaker at the Centre for the GeoHumanities at Royal Holloway, University of London. He writes on refusal, technology and militant histories. He lives between London and Zürich.

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. He lives in Los Angeles.