Hasta La Ideas

The birds inside this cuckoo clock by London design studio BERG are programmed to poke their heads out to announce Twitter messages, retweets and new followers (+ movie).

#Flock, which was commissioned from BERG by social networking service Twitter, was built using BERG Cloud, the design studio’s operating system for network-connected products.

Using a wirelessly controlled Arduino microcontroller, the three birds inside the clock are choreographed to respond immediately to activity on Twitter.

Retweets, direct messages and new followers each trigger one of the three birds to pop out of the clock, accompanied by a snippet of birdsong.

Like the studio’s Little Printer, the tiny thermal printer that led to the development of BERG Cloud, #Flock is a web-connected device designed to give digital data a physical expression.

BERG isn’t the only design studio exploring ways of making digital data tangible – we previously featured a project to print muddled news headlines harvested from the internet and a plotter set up to write and re-write text from Wikipedia as it’s updated.

Other machines on Dezeen include a mechanically operated sliding whistle that uses a bellow and levers to mimic birdsong – see all machines.

Photographs are by BERG.

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