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(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. 

In this scene from Modern Times we see a new (75 years later and it's still new to us) kind of eating machine. It leaves the worker standing at his post, hands free, while it brings the food to his mouth. It even takes standards of cleanliness into account, taking care to wipe his mouth every so often. Like much of the film the machine is played up for uneasy laughter. Even as the machine seems to appropriate the Tramp's body, sucking the agency and pleasure out of his relationship with the food, we're given to a nervous laughter that is equal parts schadenfreude and relief that this specter hasn't yet materialized (for humans, at least. There is, of course, a long history of force feeding the animals we consume.). We have to ask ourselves about the differences between this eating machine and the ones we normally are engaged in. 

(Image Credit: Modern Times via The Sill of the World)

The Tramp is strapped in; he is explicitly a component in a larger system, and we see his relationship with the food externalized. It's a transfer of an agency that perhaps has always already been external. Our tastes, desires, hunger, etc. have never been feelings that we control; instead they are forces we encounter. And while the machine does eventually go haywire, overworking the Tramp-as-component, it isn’t necessarily strange. Who hasn't had an unfortunate encounter with a fork or spoon or chop sticks? We're not just involved as components in sprawling eating machines, but as components in glitchy eating machines. Frictions abound as we bite on tines and tongues and cheeks and drop morsels and spill soup and choke. Soon after this scene we see the Tramp, himself, eaten by a machine. He is wormed through its belly, touching and working on various portions, before he's eventually vomited out. Now partially digested, he's depicted as a machine with a loose screw; desires unhinged he works every screw in sight. 

(Image Credit: Auger and Loizeau)

These feeding machines incorporate the human body as a key component in their sprawl; no matter how they’re splayed out the human body continues as the eating, energized component. James Auger and Jimmy Loizeau have conceptualized a series of robots that eat without any human intervention. The Carnivorous Domestic Entertainment Robots are designed as self-serving loops that power their consumptive practices by eating common household pests. The robot's relationship with humans can be seen as a secondary characteristic. 

(Image Credit: Auger and Loizeau)

Auger and Loizeau liken them to pets like lizards or snakes and various television shows that we keep and watch (that we consume) only so that we might witness the consumptive practices of other bodies. These robots, designed with entertainment in mind, eat pests so that they can continue to eat pets while we watch (while we visually eat them). These eating machines--table, lamp, clock, decoration--make disturbingly apparent the sprawling, tangled quality of mechanized eating. Eating and feeding machines encompass not only those bodies that enact the consumption but also the consumed bodies as well; eating machines are always already eating themselves 

(Image Credit: Wim Delvoye)

Last week, alongside his pigs, I mentioned Wim Delvoye's digestion machine Cloaca. Cloaca is ultimately a brand name for a series of machines that seek to replicate human digestion and defecation. These shitting machines, like the feeing and eating machines are also human-machine-food collaborations. With these, though, the human is put into what could be a curious position; the machine co-opts the human. It makes humans the mechanistic portion of its eating practice; they ready the enzymes and digestive juices, feed the machine, and maintain it alongside its computer guidance system. Cloaca machines have to be continuously fed and powered (unlike the small conceptual robots above Cloaca isn't powered by what it eats) or it will dry out; the bacteria that enable its digestion will starve and die. Cloaca is a living machine. But this mechanized roll as caretaker isn't strange or foreign to humans, though. We fed pets, children, ourselves. Our own digestion and especially indigestion, already separate our consumptive practices into a concatenation of many, disparate parts. Cloaca not only forcefully manifests us in that roll it exemplifies the machine-food-human hybrid that eating entails. 

(Image Credit: Wim Delvoye)

In the early, large Cloaca machines we can see the long multiplicity of digestion--gasses, bacteria, food, enzymes, salts, pumps, fluid, containers, tubes, acids, shit. Delvoye, in an interview, mentions the importance of bacteria in human and machine digestion. "In these intestines are living bacteria. Without these bacteria, you cannot digest your food. A baby, for example, is born with no bacteria in his body because he comes from the placenta. But then immediately, once he is born, he receives these bacteria."  (lacanian ink) These bacteria, as an addition to the human body, deny any notion of solitary consumption. We cannot not consume with others. We cannot not shit with others. Cloaca, as its end result, produces waste indistinguishable from human waste. And while it's the Cloaca machines that are displayed in museums ultimately it's the feces they produce that humans consume. Delvoye notes in the above interview that "The product is bottled in silicon and sold as posthuman cyber-shit... We sold all the shit."

(Image Credit: Wim Delvoye)