@pantry_bot

I posted 9 photos on twitter in the past 3 days; 3 photos per day.

For this project, I used a twitter bot that I made for a previous project. I made a surveillance ramen bot that takes a picture when it sees someone take instant ramen out of the pantry, and tweets the image on twitter. 

My laptop in the pantry, with the webcam on and code running. When the code recognizes that the pantry door is open as well as a ramen package, it takes a screenshot of the image and downloads it into a folder. The twitter bot checks every 5 seconds to see if there is a new image downloaded. If there is a new image, then the twitter bot tweets it. I wanted to play around with the idea of surveillance and documentation of a simple task. Last semester (when I was coded this twitter bot) I ate ramen everyday. I thought that it would be pretty funny and a bit absurd to have a surveillance camera whose job is to monitor me taking ramen out of the pantry. The purpose of this twitter bot is not to shame me for being unhealthy, but rather shine a light into my daily life habits. These photos are not taken during typical eating times (breakfast, lunch, dinner); rather it was lunch-ish, dinner-ish, past midnight-ish. This semester, I don’t eat as much instant ramen, so I staged most of the photos for this project (I took out the ramen but didn’t eat it).
I think that seeing the repetition of a daily task is interesting. There are subtle changes from each photo, the time of day, the lighting, and the background. I wanted to add more fun elements in these subtle changes, so I staged some of the photos, specifically the one towards the end. In the background of the most recent photos, there is a person standing in the shadows in the background. In every photo, the person gets closer to the camera. The last photo is them taking a ramen package out of the pantry. I wanted it to have the same feeling of a cursed paranormal image (similar to my dinner date laundry room image).I felt like the extremely grainy resolution, low lighting, and mundane activity of taking out ramen fits the theme.