At first glance, they look like something that escaped from a sci-fi art prank. Then one of them stops, leans back slightly, and prints an image from its rear while a small screen flashes “POOP MODE.”
This is “Regular Animals,” a new installation by digital artist Beeple at Art Basel Miami Beach, and it is less about shock value than about how technology now watches, processes, and reshapes the world around us.
The work features a pack of robotic dogs, each fitted with a hyper-realistic silicone face. Some resemble tech billionaires such as Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, and Jeff Bezos. Others take on the faces of artists like Andy Warhol and Pablo Picasso. One even mirrors Beeple himself, whose real name is Mike Winkelmann.
“What if the act of looking at art were no longer a one-way encounter,” Beeple said in a statement accompanying the installation, “but part of a feedback loop in which the artwork observes, learns, and remembers us in return?”
For that, those robots feature cameras embedded around their heads that continuously photograph their surroundings. That visual data is then reinterpreted into new AI-generated images, each shaped by the identity the robot wears. A Picasso-faced robot produces fractured, cubist-like scenes. Warhol’s outputs echo pop-art repetition. The Zuckerberg robot generates slick, digital-looking imagery reminiscent of virtual worlds.
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But the images are not just stylistic experiments; they draw attention to a bigger picture of how those characters see the world, and how their way of seeing slowly shapes reality itself.
In the past, artists played a major role in shaping how people understood the world. Today, that role has shifted toward the vision of a few tech billionaires, as Beeple puts it: “We’re increasingly seeing the world through the lens of how they would like us to see it, because they control these very powerful algorithms. They judge what we see in the world and for many people, it’s their primary source of news. They have unilateral control over how we see the world, in many ways.”
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Under the bright lights of Art Basel, the installation quickly became a crowd magnet. People laughed, filmed, grimaced, and stared in surprise as the robots shuffled, paused, and produced their prints. Online reactions called the dogs “terrifying” and “absurd,” with some viewers openly saying they wanted one.
According to reports, all of the robot dogs were already sold to private collectors at $100,000 each. Who bought them remains unclear, but for a few days in Miami, these strange mechanical animals did exactly what good art often does at big fairs.
Sources: CNN, Page Six, Beeple Studios
