Hugh Kennedy

Developer; Creative

Gerry

Gerry was a university project I completed in 2011 for one of our exhibitions: a small, friendly drone which was responsible in part for the event's photographic coverage and social media marketing.

gerry from above

Gerry would wander the exhibition space with an iPhone on his back, using its camera to take photos of unsuspecting attendees. He would then promptly post these images to his blog, his Facebook page and his Twitter account along with the occasional platitude or personal opinion.

This was a light-hearted approach to covering issues of digital privacy and security.

a few of gerry's photographs

The project was implemented using a small collection of different technologies. Gerry himself was simply an Arduino aboard a small tank tread, which would use an infrared proximity sensor to avoid obstacles – otherwise navigation was a simple random walk. The iPhone attached was running an app which would stream video through to a Processing sketch. The sketch would would analyze the feed for motion and take snapshots where appropriate. These would then be passed onto a small node.js application, which handled publishing content to various social media networks including Tumblr, Twitter and Facebook.

a few of gerry's photographs