Open Call
E M Forster’s uncannily prescient 1909 story, “The Machine Stops.”
Arts Letters & Numbers
Eligibility
Live Streamed discussion between Bob Garfield and Lawrence Weschler
Number of Participants
500
Deadline
No deadline
Duration
September 01, 2021 - September 02, 2021
Meals
No meals
Public Programs
Courses, Critique, Discussion, Mentors, Panel, Publication, Readings, Seminars
Disciplines
Activists, Research, Social Practice, Thinkers
Languages
English, Italian, Korean, Spanish
Program Description
mankind has been reduced to living underground, in hexagonal rooms “like the cells of a bee” with no apertures and throbbing ventilation, each cell containing a single individual, though everyone is connected to everyone else by way of a vast hive of intermeshed video screens. Zoom, as it were, avant la lettre. For this is how the great E. M. Forster’s visionary 1909 story “The Machine Stops” begins, with a son calling out to videoconference with his mother on the other side of the globe, to chat and to complain, “The Machine is much, but it is not everything. I see something like you in this plate, but I do not see you. I hear something like you through this telephone, but I do not hear you.”
