Every 30 minutes, the Twitter account Random Restaurant (@_restaurant_bot) posts a randomly selected restaurant’s name, address and four images scraped from the location’s Google listing. Some of the more elegant photos, with balanced colours, clean lines and smooth-looking, if not necessarily appealing, food, seem to be taken by representatives of the restaurant in question, but the majority are taken by diners or passers-by who have decided to upload them. These photos rarely follow any aesthetic criteria, but that does not diminish their fascination. I could spend hours wandering a gallery in which these pictures were displayed, taking slow time with them, imagining the worlds they imply, and the intersecting lives they capture.

Looking at the account now, the most recent ten posts are from Gambia, Kazakhstan, the Northern Mariana Islands, Hungary, Puerto Rico, Las Vegas, Trinidad and Tobago, Zambia, Hungary again, and Estonia. Glancing through these listings evokes the feeling of walking through a disordered neighbourhood, the locus of a culinary space-time collapse, where dining establishments from across the world have been uprooted from their original settings and packed together on a chaotic international main street.