Bruce Sterling

Architecture on Film @ Barbican Centre, Jun 23

22 June 2015

The London Festival of Architecture is screening two special works this Tuesday, with the UK premiere of Fortress of Solitude (2014) and a rare screening of “The Machine Stops” (1966), taking place at the Barbican Centre on June 23.

The two films, spanning almost 50 years, explore “the mechanized Smart Home” and life in the Information Age, speculating on the future of domestic life and the “quantified home”. “The Machine Stops”, an episode from the celebrated ’60s BBC sci-fi series Out of the Unknown (and based on EM Forster’s 1909 story of the same name), is a dystopian look at a civilization living in underground isolation, under the control of a computer-network. Fortress of Solitude is an essay film by research collaborative Space Caviar that examines the military-domestic complex through three chapters and explores “the role of the home in the age of the digital nomad”.

To guide the discussions, the Barbican has invited Space Caviar’s Joseph Grima and Simone Niquille, as well as science-fiction author Bruce Sterling reflecting on his IRL trial of the open source home, Casa Jasmina.

See the event page for details. **

Fortress of Solitude — Trailer from Space Caviar on Vimeo. 

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