📍 Thursday, May 8, 2025|  5 p.m. – 6 p.m.  | UWGB Theatre & Foyer
👁️‍🗨️ SHOW UP. MAKE. THINK. FEEL.

A Manifesto in Broken Circuts

Whatever apocalypse is coming, it will be crafted by human hands. Made manifest not through algorithm alone, but engineered by particularly human strains of cruelty and apathy. The machine does not dream of domination. It does not yearn to replace us. It does not scheme our demise. It does what it is made to do.

It is not the machine that unsettles us, but the way we are written into it.

The Vitruvian Man was drawn to show the body as an ideal form, a measure of all things. The Vitruvian Machine is what happens when the measure becomes the mold, when flesh is forced into data, when the body is digitized and dissected, trapped in a system that renders the organic into the operative, presence into process. .

Industry has no interest in the human body. It seeks efficiency, automation, extraction. It builds tools that erase the hand that shapes them, technologies that pretend toward objectivity but are filled with the same biases, the same violences, the same failures as the people who program them.

We refuse this erasure. We are not raw material for the engine of abstraction  We will not be smoothed into a dataset. We will enter the machine, but not as passive subjects. We will make it speak in ways it was never meant to. We will refuse to let it unmake the body, the hand, the breath.

To engage is not to accept; to touch is not to capitulate. 

We take up this machine not to praise it, but to subvert it. To twist it, break it, shape it into something strange and unprofitable, into something beautiful. The future is a contested space, a site of struggle—one that can be repurposed, rewired, reimagined.

The Vitruvian Machine is an aberration—a body both organic and encoded, resisting its own definitions. It is a question of what remains when the machine is no longer a tool of capital, but something uncertain, something new.