Autodîneur

by Steph Marsden and Harry Josephine Giles

Autodîneur is a computer-generated guide for an exploratory eating experience. Each time you visit you will receive a new set of instructions to follow for a new kind of meal. The instructions will help you use all your faculties to get messily in touch with your food.

Feeling hungry? Ready for a snack? Our guided meal time will allow you to select prompts for your eating experience. Click here to begin your meal.

Alternatively, visit our Twitter page to join the perpetual meal.

About the Project

Every day, we hand over autonomy to algorithms to decide music we listen to, what news we follow and whose opinions we listen to. When we discuss food and robots, we usually focus on using this technology to prepare, pack or distribute our food. Rarely do we entrust them with how we approach the rituals of dining or eating. Autodîneur is our response, a procedurally generated guide for an eating experience. 

We made Autodîneur to be:

• Gently provocative, but still safe. You can also decide which rules to obey and which to skip.

• Engaging to all the senses.

• Thought-provoking, disrupting the soft rituals of food.

• Usable both independently or in a group, for casual snacks or formal dining experiences.

• Accessible and adaptable to different needs and bodies.

• Open source, with the basic code available to be developed and shared.

Autodîneur is food poetry, recombining words we associate with eating experiences to create new contexts and dialogues. 

The source code is available and welcomes comments at Cheap Bots Done Quick. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

Autodîneur is written in Tracery and adapted on this page with Twine. The illustration is by Kaitlin Mechan.