At least one future is here right now. The prankster art / marketing collective MSCHF recently spent $74,500 to purchase a Spot robo-dog from Boston Dynamics. It mounted a Tippmann 98 paintball gun on its back and is allowing people around the world to remotely control the bot via their phones in an art gallery filled with its own work for two minutes at a time. MSCHF is calling it Spot's Rampage, and the event is happening on February 24th at 1PM ET. When killer robots come to America they will be wrapped in fur, carrying a ball.

Forget'a bull in a china shop' -- tomorrow, members of the public will be able to take remote control of an armed, paintball-firing robotic dog in an art gallery. Quirky, chaos-loving, New York-based start-up MSCHF (pronounced'mischief') are behind the campaign, which highlights the risk of such machines being misused. MSCHF mounted the compressed air gun onto the back one of Boston Dynamics' $75,000 Spot robots and will be linking its controls to a public website. Spot's'rampage' will begin at 13:00 EST (18:00 GMT) on February 24, 2021 and every two minutes the site will hand over control to a different smartphone user. The event is being held in a small art gallery constructed in MSCHF's Brooklyn offices -- one populated by paintings, vases, boxes and the firm's past products. Boston Dynamics have criticised MSCHF's paintball-firing application of their robot -- calling it the stunt a'spectacle' that'fundamentally misrepresents' Spot.

Boston Dynamics has racked up hundreds of millions of YouTube views with viral clips of its futuristic, legged robots dancing together, doing parkour, and working in a warehouse. A group of meme-spinning pranksters now wants to present a more dystopian view of the company's robotic tech. They added a paintball gun to Spot, the company's doglike machine, and plan to let others control it inside a mocked-up art gallery via the internet later this week. The project, called Spot's Rampage, is the work of MSCHF (pronounced "mischief," of course), an internet collective that regularly carries out meme-worthy pranks. Previous MSCHF stunts include creating an app that awarded $25,000 to whomever could hold a button down for the longest; selling "Jesus Shoes" sneakers with real holy water in the soles (Drake bought a pair); developing an astrology-based stock-picking app; and cutting up and selling individual spots from a Damian Hirst painting.