The Living Machine

Laetitia Schleking

The Living Machine is thought as an expansion to the novel ‘’The Machine Stops’’ by E.M. Forster, in which the story continues in a world where humans were no longer supported by the machines and have died. In our relentless pursuit of greatness, optimization, and perfection, we have lost ourselves. Our bodies. Our soul and our sense of self. Time has shaped us into something new. A Living Machine. Not alive but existing. Senseless wandering through the shallow wasteland of planet earth’s surface and what is left of it. 
This Projects aims to explore an alternative ending of Forster’s story and touches upon questions about the human body and its intervention between machines and organic beings, what it means to be alive and searches for the boundaries of death, life and merely existing. 
On the basis of transhumanism emerges a new Human Being. Emerging from the Underground the machine spread to life, imitating and replicating life and humans. Though soon it is to realize, a machine can never be a living being. The Machine fails and what is left are remains of bodies and objects that can only remind one of the humans that once were and the life that was once lived.