Art-O-Mat: Breathing Life into Cigarette Dispensers

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Tomorrow, the American Cancer Society (ACS) will sponsor their 35th annual Great American Smokeout. The observance is an effort to encourage smokers to quit for 24 hours.  After profiling vintage cigarette ads in a recent DesignCrave feature, we got to thinking about how and what has changed in the past 35 years and what ever happened to those ubiquitous cigarette vending machines of yesteryear.

Art-o-mat takes retired cigarette vending machines and convert them to vend art. There are over 90 active machines in various locations throughout the country.  There are around 400 contributing artists from 10 different countries currently involved in the Art-o-mat project.