Drawing of the image-defecating duck from Camerautomata.org, image (c) of the authors

I wish I was in NYC this week, a lot is happening there. My friend Asintomatic who’s been living in Manhattan for a year reported about a project presented at Eyebeam called Camerautomata. It is a duck that will give you the evil eye, take a pic of you and post it to flickr. This fellow is a -and I quote literally- ‘Magical Image Digesting Robotic Duck’. Charlie, the duck, is a participatory ‘Image- Technology’ for photographic intervention in public spaces. The project explores the system in which digital images are produced and consumed in urban space as well as information space. Where as the conventional image technology (ex:cameras) isolate people(ex.tourists) from their immediate environment, ‘Camerautomata’ brings strangers together by the act of photographing. The duck digests and defecates the photograph and also posts on his flickr site via WIFI. The duck is a eclectic collage of hacking automatic electronics (digital camera/ portable printer/ motorized decoy/ roomba/ etc) and controlled by a microprocessor…

Picture of the Duck by Asintomatic, (c) of the author

According to my friend, the microprocessor part of the description is an Arduino board. And it is just that in NYC Arduino is hot, and not hot like in “this is burning my USB port” kinda hot. But there are a lot of projects being made and presented having “Arduino inside”. I bet that the ITP show this year will have some of those. If you have the time, pass by ITP on May 12th and 13th. There is always good stuff coming out of that school.

Image by NYCresitor, (c) of the authors

I opened the post talking about Papaya, but I actually wanted to write about the Arduino cake from NYCresistor: There was a fight over the AVR chip (dark chocolate) which involved memory loss and a cake knife. Candles became wire sticking out of the pins. Seriously awesome. Next task: to make LED candles that you have to short out instead of blow out.

NYCresistor is a collective in Brooklyn that will offer a whole bunch of workshops, arrange events and -why not- explore the boundaries between electronics and food. I still wonder how Paola aka Asintomatic got to find them …