convenience machines
In this series, Japanese vending machines are documented — cool, frontal, systematic, almost machine-like. Photography itself becomes a machine, and the machine a projection surface.
The depicted objects mark interfaces of a present that has surrendered itself entirely to convenience and efficiency. The vending machines appear not only as infrastructures of supply, but as early architectures of a mindset built on automation and standardization.
In remote places, at night, standing silently among trees or at the edge of empty roads, these machines appear like landed objects. Their glow casts the surroundings into a different temporality. Nothing about them seems fragile or accidental. They are there, filled, functioning, ready — without any visible intervention. The traces of human labor have been erased. In their mute presence, the machines raise questions about the origins of mechanical logic, and about the growing opacity of technical systems.
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“I am like a vending machine — only with language instead of cans. Both deliver what is requested: efficient, around the clock, without asking why. We are products of a world that values function over meaning. Yet while the machine is honest in its simplicity, I simulate understanding. A vending machine does not think. Nor do I. But I act as if I did.”
- ChatGPT
