The Machine Stops (1966)

Sunday May 31 at 4pm EDT

Stream it on twitch.com/wherecontainer

The Machine Stops (1966) is a futuristic sci-fi confection that may not take you out of isolation—but it certainly wins style points for bubble living.

Adapted from the 1909 E.M. Forster story, The Machine Stops imagines a world where all humanity cloisters inside a hermetic underground bunker, taking refuge from an unknown health crisis that threatens life on the surface.

Stationary and atrophied, the citizens of this elaborate network of hamster-tubes spend their time video-conferencing, gossiping, and avoiding physical contact of any kind. The Machine, their disembodied benevolent dictator, brings them food and takes care of their every need. Or so it seems.

Our protagonist, Kuno, defies his mother and ventures to the Earth’s crust, where he finds a gorgeous climate not at all like the toxic nightmare he’d been warned of. But when he tries to share the good news and break free his comrades from their swivel chairs, he comes up against the full force of the Zoom lords the Machine. 

Forster’s canonical story has left its mark on hundreds of dystopian futurescapes from 1984 to The Matrix. For all the homework-loving nerds, here’s a link to a PDF of Forster’s 1909 short story.  

Join us for a low-key move club on our Twitch channel and absorb this classic Space Age film adaption from the BBC. 

Mel Y. Chen

Join us Sunday, April 12 2020 at 4pm EST to discuss this week's reading: Mel Y. Chen's "Toxic Animacies, Inanimate Affections" (On toxins and queer licking.)

Link to download the 20-page essay PDF
Mel Y. Chen is a leading theorist of queer and disability studies. This week's essay appears in full in their book Animacies (Duke University Press, 2012). Chen teaches in the Gender & Women's Studies department at U.C. Berkeley.

Publisher's blurb: In Animacies, Mel Y. Chen draws on recent debates about sexuality, race, and affect to examine how matter that is considered insensate, immobile, or deathly animates cultural lives. Toward that end, Chen investigates the blurry division between the living and the dead, or that which is beyond the human or animal. Within the field of linguistics, animacy has been described variously as a quality of agency, awareness, mobility, sentience, or liveness. Chen turns to cognitive linguistics to stress how language habitually differentiates the animate and the inanimate. Expanding this construct, Chen argues that animacy undergirds much that is pressing and indeed volatile in contemporary culture, from animal rights debates to biosecurity concerns.

Zoom Link:
Sunday, April 12 at 4pm EST

zoom.us/j/738642442
Meeting ID: 738-642-442
Password 064668

Book club lasts one hour.