Canard Digérateur or Why A Duck?

This is Canard Digérateur or The Digesting Duck (or The Doo-Doo Bird) - a 1739 invention from Frenchman Jacques de Vaucanson. Infamous at the time for replicating the creation of bird droppings, and even purported to metabolize foodstuffs entered into the metal beak through completely artificial ingenuity. It’s now remembered as a hyped-up farce that deposited robo-shit from a separate surplus hidden away behind its metal casing.

This fouling fowl is interesting for about 1000 different philosophical reasons, all pondering the same question: “What the - ?”

The most interesting from the point of view of automatons is that this is hardly a corrective on “real life”  - that is, it doesn’t attempt to making life any simpler or more pleasureful by practical means, nor does it make the world less “human” by stripping away (or covering up) some of our more obvious limitations (cough - cough).

It seems like a slight of hand on de Vaucanson’s part.

What better way to present the illusion of mechanical life that to replicate our stupidities? If it didn’t shit, this would just be a child’s toy (even though now there are many dolls which defecate). Because the machine bypasses the faithful acquisition of ALL nature’s components by replicating one of the truly mundane, embarrassing and obscene particularities of “living”, this Canard Digérateur presents an uncanny assemblage of Nature and Science that proximity-obsessed Realism, big at the time, could never achieve.

So it is the “What the - ?” quality of the thing makes it much more human than robotic, which is after all what the fantasy of robots is all about.