Motivation

Back in my first year as cruft, I went back to MIT to visit friends for “worse ideas week”, an extension of the broader east side’s “bad ideas weekend”. To give you a sense of the total stupidity involved, past worse ideas have included actual bloodletting with leeches. So when my friend Anhad proposed a “performance hack” involving recreating SCP-294, I thought that it actually sounded like a really Good Idea, and decided to sign up to help him out, along with many other pals.

We assembled and painted a “vending machine” in with a keyboard and monitor duct taped on, where people could order anything, and we would sit inside and try to make a version of their request as a beverage, which we would then deliver in a dixie cup, our hands reaching out through a flap in the cardboard. Out in Lobby 7 at MIT, this drew attention from strangers, friends, tourists, and campus police officers. It did turn out that very few people besides our friends wanted to drink a strange liquid that was offered by a mysterious hand emerging from a mysterious box. However, on the whole, I found the interaction so delightful that I swore I would one day recreate this experience in San Francisco.

Some goals I had in my recreation of the vending machine were to make it Accessible and engaging for people not familiar with the SCP Reusable (the original cardboard frame basically fell apart completely at the end of a single use) Transportable on public transportation by 1 or 2 people (the SCP machine had to be hauled on a dolly and stabilized by several people, even when only transported a quarter mile) Compact and easy to assemble and disassemble (I lived in a shared triple room at in a co-op at the time, and the garage only had a small slot of available for the storage of my belongings)

Assembly

So, I decided that the frame for my vending machine should be PVC, given its durability the ease of assembly and disassembly with PVC connectors. I sketched out the rough dimensions needed to fit me inside and still have roughly the same aspect ratio as a vending machine, went to Home Depot, purchased the PVC and connectors, and cut the PVC down to size.

I wanted the machine to have an eye-catching and vaguely vaporwave aesthetic, but also seem recognizably like a vending machine, so I relied on the recognizability of an existing brand (please do not consider this an endorsement of coca cola). I mocked up a couple of examples and it was time to go to one of my favorite places in the world: the fabric store! I went to the sadly now-closed Fabric Outlet in the mission. I’d originally planned to sew a cover for the entire frame with a zipper, but realized when I got there that I’d need a pretty durable material to paint on and would want the rest of the vending machine to be black and as lightweight and wrinkle-proof as possible for ease of transportation, so I chose some canvas for the front, a holographic material for the lettering, and black spandex for the sides and back. I projected the letters onto the holographic fabric and cut them out, and then got to painting a gradient on the canvas with spraypaint- as you can see here, my first attempts at a gradient did not work so well, but I later cleaned it up with acrylic paint, which required less skill to blend easily.

I asked my friends Steven and Dirk to help with the electronics for the keypad- I’d ordered an 80 dollar keypad off of AliExpress and had no idea how finicky it would be to work with, and as it turned out, all the outputs were [serial?? Needed to be decrypted in some annoying way… ask Steven]. Steven and Dirk were immensely helpful in getting this set up, and decided to continue on as collaborators for the rest of the project, providing a great deal of support!

When the