Because sometimes we all need to break the 4th wall.
We’ve all been there — someone says something stupid and we wish there was a camera in the room that we could turn to with a deadpan stare.
“Stare into the camera like ‘The Office’” has officially ascended from classic meme to state of mind with the release of The Office Stare Machine. Enter almost any emotion you can think of and the machine will play clips of characters from the show looking at the camera with that exact emotion. (Seriously, there are almost 800 different emotions that the machine can translate, from “disgruntled” to “murderous” to “horny.” Try it!)
Creating the Stare Machine was a labor of love for hero/all-around genius Joe Sabia. Sabia is just a normal guy with a fancy day job at Condé Nast who spent a year and a half of his life indexing every single stare from the show’s 201 episodes.
“I created this project to advocate for copyright reform and highlight the importance of fair use in protecting creators and their art,” Sabia says on the Stare Machine’s website.
Once Sabia had catalogued all those stares-to-camera, his friend Aaron Rasmussen, who’s an inventor living in San Francisco, coded it into the machine.
Go take a look and revel in this genius work of “The Office” fandom. There’s even an easter egg if you watch all 706 stares.
