A striking installation featuring robot dogs with hyper-realistic silicone heads, modeled after figures such as Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, Andy Warhol, and Pablo Picasso, is currently roaming a Berlin gallery.
The mechanical canines occasionally "poo" printed images of their surroundings, captured by integrated cameras and transformed by artificial intelligence.
The interactive artwork, titled "Regular Animals," is the creation of American artist Beeple, real name Mike Winkelmann, and is on display at Berlin's New National Gallery.
Each printed image offers a snippet of reality, reinterpreted by AI to reflect the "worldview" of the human figure adorning the dog's shoulders – for instance, the Picasso dog generates images in a Cubist style, while Warhol's produces pop art.
This provocative commentary explores how our perceptions are increasingly shaped by algorithms and technology platforms, according to the exhibition organizers.
Beeple explained to The Associated Press: "In the past, our view of the world was shaped in part by how artists saw the world. How Picasso painted changed how we saw the word, how Warhol talked about consumerism, pop culture, that changed how he saw those things."
He added that today, our understanding of the world is largely dictated by tech billionaires who control powerful algorithms, determining what information we see and what we do not.
"That's an immense amount of power that I don’t think we’ve fully understood, especially because when they want to make a change, they don’t need to lobby the U.N. They don’t need to get something through Congress or the EU, they just wake up and change these algorithms."
The robot dogs also feature heads modelled in Beeple’s own image.
Lisa Botti, the exhibition's curator, highlighted artificial intelligence as one of the most impactful phenomena of our time, stating that "museums are the places where society can reflect" on such transformations, which motivated her to showcase Beeple’s work.
The installation was first unveiled at Art Basel Miami Beach 2025.
Beeple, a graphic designer from South Carolina, is renowned for his digital artwork and is a founder of the "everyday" movement in 3D graphics, creating and posting a new image online daily without fail for years.
His prominence in the art world is significant; Christie's ranks him as the third most expensive living artist to sell at auction, behind David Hockney and Jeff Koons.
In spring 2021, Christie’s auctioned Beeple's digital collage, "Everydays: The First 5000 Days," for over $$69 million. The auction house described the artwork as "critiques of modern society, the government and social media," often depicting "grotesque, dystopian futures" and featuring celebrities such as Donald Trump and Kanye West.
This landmark sale marked the first time a major auction house offered a digital-only artwork with a non-fungible token (NFT) to guarantee its authenticity, and the first instance of cryptocurrency being used to pay for art at auction.
NFTs are electronic identifiers that confirm the authenticity of a digital collectible by recording details on a digital ledger known as a blockchain, having recently surged in popularity within the online collecting world as an offshoot of the cryptocurrency boom.
At the Art Basel 2025 event, Beeple distributed the "pooed" photographs to audience members, each accompanied by a certificate humorously declaring "100% organic GMO-free dog shit."
Some prints included QR codes providing access to free NFTs, effectively allowing Beeple to give away his digital art for potential monetisation by the recipients, who sometimes included the subjects of the photos themselves.
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