"Artists" Gave A Robot $100 In Bitcoin a Day To Randomly Buy Stuff Off The DeepWeb...Ended Up With a Hungarian Passport and Ecstasy
CNBC - This is the curious story of how a robot armed with a weekly budget of $100 in bitcoin managed to buy Ecstasy, a Hungarian passport and a baseball cap with a built-in camera—before getting arrested. The “automated online shopping bot” was set up in October last year by Swiss art group, !Mediengruppe Bitnik, as an art installation to explore the “dark web”—the hidden, un-indexed part of the Internet. Each week, the robot was given $100 worth of Bitcoin— the major hard-to-trace cryptocurrency—and programmed to randomly purchase one item from Agora, an online marketplace on the dark web where shoppers can buy drugs and other illegal items. The items were automatically delivered to a Swiss art gallery called Kunst Halle St Gallen to form an exhibition. The robot was christened “Random Darknet Shopper” and its purchases included a Hungarian passport, Ecstasy pills, fake Diesel jeans, a Sprite can with a hole cut out in order to stash cash, Nike trainers, a baseball cap with a hidden camera, cigarettes and the “Lord of the Rings” e-book collection. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the robot and his artistic creators had a run in with the law. In January 2015, the Swiss police confiscated the robot and its illegal purchases.
The artists behind the robot escaped without any charges. “This is a great day for the ‘bot, for us and for freedom of art!” !Mediengruppe Bitnik, said in a blog post last week. “In the order for withdrawal of prosecution, the public prosecutor states that the possession of Ecstasy was indeed a reasonable means for the purpose of sparking public debate about questions related to the exhibition.”
ART! FUCK YEA ART! Finally some art that I can get behind. It’s not vomiting milk onto a canvas, it’s not a blue square worth 40 million dollars, it’s a robot buying drugs for you on the internet and calling it art. That’s some next level art. If this fuckhead can get away with buying ecstasy, nothing is illegal anymore. I’m never not calling myself an artist ever again. Run a red light? It was performance art, bro. Drive drunk? Don’t you dare suppress my artistic integrity. Grab a girl’s ass at the bar? Clearly just a very sexy art piece I’m working on. We’re all artists. Best news ever.