Useless Machines
UCLA DESMA 289 — Special Topics in Media Arts
Winter 2026 · Graduate seminar
Course Overview
Useless Machines examines uselessness as an artistic and critical strategy across sculpture, software, performance, and speculative design. The seminar studies machines that resist, sabotage, or withdraw from functionality — from useful objects rendered useless through recontextualization (readymades), to devices that technically function while undermining their own purpose (Chindōgu inventions, hostile interfaces, Rube Goldberg machines), to systems that refuse usefulness altogether (self-negating machines, self-destructing sculptures, esoteric programming languages).
Rather than treating usefulness as a neutral technical property, the course frames it as a cultural and ideological condition shaped by histories of labor, optimization, automation, and efficiency. Through readings, short films, discussion, and hands-on experimentation, students develop artifacts, systems, performances, or documentation that foreground failure, excess, refusal, and misbehavior. Documentation is treated as part of the work itself — projects may be physical, computational, performative, speculative, or hybrid, and may remain intentionally low-fidelity when conceptually appropriate.
The Semester Arc
Students work through a sequence of weekly provocations, moving from analysis toward a self-contained system of their own:
- Positional Analysis — plotting works on a useful/useless matrix to build a shared critical vocabulary
- Useful Useless Things — rendering a functional object useless through recontextualization alone
- Useless Useful Things — devices that function while creating friction, absurd effort, or misplaced optimization
- Useless Useless Things — machines that actively refuse usefulness
- Energy Flow Analysis — mapping where a system's energy, time, labor, and attention actually go
- Software & Computational Uselessness — programs that refuse input, waste computation, or collapse under their own logic
- Performing Uselessness — machines that enact rituals with no measurable outcome
- Speculative & Fictional Systems — earnest, professional documentation for machines that cannot exist
- Toy Universes & Gadget Ecosystems — a final, coherent system of three to five related useless objects
