The Coca Cola Suicide Robot

We have featured our fair share of robots on Thoughts from the Sidelines – from dancing robots to bicycle riding robots – but this robot is a little different as it was designed to commit robot suicide by drinking Coca Cola.

Referred to as C3 (a parody of Coca Cola’s new low carbohydrate C2 drink) the robot was designed with the ability to seek out spillages of the famous carbonated drink which it would then use to kill itself.

You can see the video of the C3 robot – developed for a project entitled “Studies of Work Atmospheres and Mass Production” - experiencing its fatal Coke overdose after the jump.

The reasoning behind the C3 robot, and its desired to commit suicide, is best described by this quote from Matt Kenyon, who originally uploaded this video to the YouTube site:

In this artwork, the routine destruction we do to our bodies, mitigated through corporate mass media, is comically expressed through a robot named C3 (parodying Coca Cola’s new low-carb product C2). C3 is a hex-crawler robot, outfitted with a CMUcam, enabling it with the ability to search and find puddles of Coca Cola placed on the gallery floor. When C3 finds a puddle of coke, it sucks the beverage up through an electrical pump, and then sprays it across itself. The acidic nature of the coke eventually eats through the robots skin, finding its way to the circuitry, causing it to break down. The robot is designed to find and consume until it kills itself. Companies such as Coca Cola deploy marketing strategies that completely infuse our culture with a sense of well being and elevated self worth that contradicts the actual benefits of the consumable product.

You can view the C3 seeking out its certain death by fizzy drink in the video below by clicking on the picture to stream or you can download the video, if you prefer, by clicking on the link provided.