Coke Is It, by SWAMP, is a robotic performance, a comment on the marketing strategies deployed by companies such as Coca Cola. They infuse our culture with a sense of well being and elevated self worth that contradicts the actual benefits of the consumable product.
C3 is a hex-crawler robot, outfitted with a CMUcam and sensors, 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. After several feedings, the acidic nature of the coke eventually eats through the robots skin. Eventually this “digestive” process finds its way to the circuitry, causing it to break down.
The performance concludes when the robot is consumed to the point where it has killed itself.
Suicide in media art: Kurt Cobain’s Suicide letter meets google adsense; Suicide Solution, a DVD documentation collected over a year of committing suicide in over 50 first and third person shooter games; and The Lovers, two networked machines, one infected with a virus, slowly infecting the other through the interface of classic romantic poetry.