January 31, 2015
The art project i posted yesterday reminded me of another automated art project by the swiss art collective !Mediengruppe Bitnik called Random Darknet Shopper.
The group set up an automated shopping robot, gave him a budget of $100 per week in bitcoins and let him shop around in the Darknet – on it’s own. The items he bought were then displayed in an exibition called “The Darknet: From Memes to Onionland“, at the Kunst Halle Sankt Gallen, Switzerland.
The Random Darknet Shopper is a live Mail Art piece, an exploration of the deep web via the goods traded there. It directly connects the Darknet with the art space (exhibition space). By randomizing our consumerism, we are guaranteed a wide selection of goods from the over 16’000 listed on Agora market place.
The robot bought things like fake Diesel Jeans, a pair of Nike’s, a baseball cap with a hidden camera, a fake Louis Vuitton handbag and also 10 ecstasy pills.
I think the project cleverly forced us to ask some interesting questions, like who’s responsible for a violation of the law if a robot commits it that acts autonomously. As Mike Power wrote in his article “What happens when a software bot goes on a darknet shopping spree” in the Guardian:
Can a robot, or a piece of software, be jailed if it commits a crime? Where does legal culpability lie if code is criminal by design or default? What if a robot buys drugs, weapons, or hacking equipment and has them sent to you, and police intercept the package?
It looks like. On the morning of January 12, the day after the three-month exhibition was closed, the public prosecutor’s office of St. Gallen seized and sealed the work.
It seems, the purpose of the confiscation is to impede an endangerment of third parties through the drugs exhibited by destroying them. This is what we know at present. We believe that the confiscation is an unjustified intervention into freedom of art.
Random Darknet Shopper (2014) by !Mediengruppe bitnik