Towards The Rotating Knives

Via Balloon Juice, what do you get when you cross robots, performance art, and bio-microbial fuel cells?

Pest-disposing death furniture.

Let's begin with their digital wall clock, which doesn't need a battery or a plug because it gets its energy from eating flies.

This carnivorous clock ("8 dead flies makes it work for about 12 days," says co-designer Professor Chris Melhuish, of Bristol Robotics) is just a prototype. It doesn't catch enough flies to power the motor on top and the digital clock. But this is just a first step.
 As Professor Melhuish explains on another video:

What we have here is a belt. The white thing is a belt that's covered in honey. So it operates just like standard flypaper. Flies would be attracted to that honey. They'd land on the belt, get stuck, as you can see it is moving down very, very slowly, and right underneath here there's a blade and the blade scrapes off any insects that have become stuck to the honey. They fall into the microbial fuel cell underneath. And this is the device that turns that organic matter into electrical energy.

I know there's a notion (popular with the sci-fi crowd and especially with "singularity" enthusiasts) that one day machines are going to develop primitive minds of their own, learn how to repair themselves, copy themselves and find their own energy sources. At which point, they will become our evolutionary successors and rapidly evolve into some sort of uber-beings. I am privately wary of this idea, but Auger & Loizeau clearly find it intriguing to think about.

Needless to say, the larger furniture is powered by disposing of...larger pests.  (Bon, you miiiiight want to skip the part about the table.)

The whole thing of course reminds me of this.



(I'm serious about the table, Bon.)