intro

History

The Bavarian Pigeon Corps: 1903 An innovative attempt to avoid dangerous balloons or uncertain kites was to attach a very light camera to a carrier pigeon. These cameras took a picture every thirty seconds as the pigeon winged its way along a straight course to its home shelter. Releasing the birds behind enemy lines presented no small problem. In addition, the pigeons were rather tasty to hungry troops who shot them down.

Beginning from the wearables, drifting to implant technology, we finally ended up somewhere in between, namely, to edibles; technology, that we eat, behaves like implants but only for temporary period of time.

Major problems with encountered in our project, was to find effective interface, how to access information from the edibles in a meaningful way and to justify the eating of circuitry in the first place. People were generally very much against the idea. Hence we ended up looking at the animal realm, where connotations would not play any role.

The technologies we were looking at were firstly transponder chips that are currently already used in tagging animals. These chips have no power supply but function with induction. They contain a digital fingerprint that can be read with a reader device. Secondly, we were looking at GPS tracking systems, that would know exactly where the birds were at any given time. Both approaches would have their limitations. The transponders would need the readers to be installed to every camera, and the size, price and lifetime of the GPS chips would be not realistic yet today.

The CCTV networks in big cities are already very dense and growing in increasing speed. There are already more than 1 million cameras in UK and the number is expected to more than double in 3 years. A private study in Manhattan showed that there were at least 2400 CCTV cameras installed.

The data protection act would enable individuals in principle to have access to these images, yet creating the infrastructure for such would be quite a task.

The misuse of the technology was also considered, and we created scenarios about how people might begin to use the system, ranging from terrorists' monitoring tool to crackers' pranks to intimidate people.