viz.

Image Credit: Briggo.com

There’s a coffee robot upstairs. I have never used it. Sometime earlier in the year—maybe over the winter break—a new, brightly colored store-front popped up in the Flawn Academic Center. It seemed to be selling coffee. It also seemed to be a robot. Rather than a counter with cash register, tip jar, and human barista, all the trappings we’ve come to expect , its front façade has screens and cups and coffee spouts.  From what I’ve seen you can order right there, off to the side on a touch screen, or online. Think about that, you could buy a cup of coffee while you read this. If the coffee robot teams up with a fleet of delivery robots we’d really be living in some kind of future.

(Image Credit: liberallifestyles.com)

Our encounters with food are wrought through with machines; we eat alongside them in human-machine collaboration.  Almost any moment of consumption has at its conception this collaborative process. Simple tools like knives and forks and plates and cups when combined with hands and mouths as well as concepts like etiquette form complex eating machines. Dinning, even absent any consideration for the bodies that are actually being consumed (and hose bodies, of course, have perhaps even more drastic combinatory consequences for the human body), always involves this sprawl. The body is expanded, splayed out, so that any particular point--tongue, teeth, fork, fingers--act as a discrete component of a larger machine.