created 2025-03-28, & modified, =this.modified
rel: The Machine As Seen at the End of the Mechanical Age - MoMA
The Canard Digérateur, or Digesting Duck, was an automaton in the form of a duck, created by Jacques de Vaucanson and unveiled on 30 May 1764 in France.
Feigned Feces production, amazing:
The mechanical duck appeared to have the ability to eat kernels of grain, and to metabolize and defecate them. While the duck did not actually have the ability to do this—the food was collected in one inner container, and the pre-stored feces were “produced” from a second, so that no actual digestion took place.
In 2002, Belgian conceptual artist Wim Delvoye introduced the world to his “Cloaca Machine”, a mechanical art work that actually digests food and turns it into excrement, fulfilling Vaucanson’s wish for a working digestive automation. Many iterations of the Cloaca Machine have since been produced; the latest iteration sits vertically, mimicking the human digestive system. The excrement produced by the machine is vacuum-sealed in Cloaca-branded bags and sold to art collectors and dealers; every series of excrements produced has sold out.