With this project, publisher Short Edition invites commuters in Grenoble, France, to exchange digital distractions, such as their mobile phones, for analog poetry and short stories. The publisher installed eight Short Story Dispensers around the city; each machine provides free stories and poetry printed on a ribbon receipt. With the push of a button, readers select stories based on the length of read time: one, three, or five minutes. Six hundred stories for the dispensers, such as Mon Chat est Mon Chien (My Cat is My Dog), were drawn from more than 60,000 publications on the publisher’s website.

Jen Dolen is a photographer and is on the editorial team of Public Art Review.

From Public Art Review #54, where this article originally appeared in Projects We Love as “Short Story Dispensers.”