Totem

Japan has the highest density of vending machines worldwide. Anything can be found anywhere. Vending machines rule over an empire of convenience. The pervasive automated machines tell us a story about a convergence of factors unique to Japan: high cost of labour and population density, expensive real state, very low vandalism and fascination with automation. Vending machines also tell us a global story about modern societies. “Totem” explores how vending machines emerge as totemic symbols of an industrialized world. While totems often connect us with ancestry, “vending totems” connect us with the tutelary dimension of technology and its ruling over life and the living. The sculptural volumes of these ubiquitious automated dispensers act in the public space as magnifying lenses of tensions between society and nature, tradition and modernity, humanity and machines. “Totem” enquires about these tensions focusing on the machines and their environments. The absence of humans in settings conceived by them for their own convenience questions the validity of our social construct about modernity. Convenience or dependance? Freedom or servitude? Kings or vassals? Gods or worshippers?