Ducks Feed People is a final group project of the 2010 fall studio class of the Digital World & Image Group at Georgia Tech. The class looked into spatial subversions and asked how to bring seemingly everyday situations and spaces to the foreground to change our behavior in these locations.
The goal of this particular project was to change everyday behavior in a public space with the help of digital media. Certain locations support human behavior we too easily get used to and stop recognizing as part of often highly complex social performances.
Ducks Feed People focuses on public parks and one typical behavior often performed there: visitors feeding ducks (or geese, squirrel, and other animals). A typical pleasure of a urban dweller with some connection to whatever nature life is left in the neighborhood. It is directed from us humans to the needy animal.
But what if the feeding would be reversed?
We turned the ducks into food providers for park visitors. To achieve that, we built a large artificial duck head and tested it in Atlanta's Piedmont Park. A web cam detects the presence and activity of ducks in the pond. This activity, then, triggers, the artificial bird head, which lets sweets rain from its beak - feeding the humans.
The result is a new picture of interdependency between human and animal visitors to the park.
To learn more about the project and how we arrived at this installation, look at the studio's blog.
The team: Andrew Quitmeyer, Thomas Lodato, Vignesh Swaminathan, Rebecca Rouse, Nick Poirier, Laurie Marion, Laura Fries, Matt Drake, Michael Nitsche (faculty).
For more info mail: dwiginfo[at]gatech.edu