Make:

Great write up on Wim Delvoye's Cloaca @ we make money not art. It's a desktop sized machine that eats food and digests it...

The Casino de Luxembourg has recently held a retrospective exhibition of Delvoye's defecating machines.

The whole family was there: Cloaca Original, Cloaca - New & Improved, Cloaca Turbo, Cloaca Quattro, Cloaca N° 5, Super Cloaca and Personal Cloaca. Plus original drawings, 3D and x-ray photographs, models of Cloaca Clinic gates, videos, sealed bags of Cloaca Faeces and other paraphernalia.

0aacloamini.jpgThe brand new 8th Cloaca, Mini Cloaca (on the left), was premiered at the Casino. The tubular structure is made of metal and glass, and composed of mechanical organs that swallow, grind, digest and defecate a given amount of food. While Super Cloaca consumes 300 kg of food and produces 80 kg of faeces per day, the quantity of food ingested by the dwarfed one is equivalent to that of a breakfast.

The idea of a mechanical reproduction of the human digestive system goes back to the Digesting Duck by 18th century engineer Jacques de Vaucanson and just like Piero Manzoni 's Merda d'artista [Artist's shit] Delvoye's machines can be regarded as an assault on the system of art.

Related:

• Cloaca - Link.
• Cloaca machines - Link.
• Ars Electronica 2007 - Link.