- A new installation at Berlin’s Neue Nationalgalerie features robot dogs with hyper-realistic silicone heads
- Some of tech’s biggest figureheads, including Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Mark Zuckerberg, are depicted
- They also “poop” out printed images captured with integrated cameras and augmented with customized AI
If you’ve not already seen videos of American Artist Beeple (Mike Winkelmann)’s “Regular Animals” art piece, you’re likely suffering from a severe lack of context and confusion at this headline.
The installation, currently housed at Berlin’s Neue Nationalgalerie, features free-roaming robot dogs with hyper-realistic silicone heads, some of which are sculpted in the image of renowned tech figures such as Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Mark Zuckerberg. Others depict famed artists like Pablo Picasso or Andy Warhol; all individuals with, in one way or another, unique perspectives on the world.
It’s those perspectives that form the backbone of Winkelmann’s work, as the Unitree Go2 robot dogs will “poop” out printed images as they autonomously roam around the hall. These images are captured by integrated cameras and processed by AI, producing printouts that reflect each robodog persona’s perspective.
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Is it crude? Perhaps, but the installation and dark humor have certainly been a conversation starter in and out of the tech sphere.
In this latest project of viral fame, Beeple poses a question that perhaps more of us should be asking: Should our worldview be governed by tech and the powerful figures who control it?
It’s an especially pertinent question in the post-AI world we live in, wherein lax regulations, extraordinary market disruption, and a race to the finish all converge, leaving in their wake a mess of questionable ethics and environmental impact.
It’s also something we briefly discussed in the latest episode of the TechRadar Podcast, specifically relating to a recent New Yorker profile on Sam Altman and the backlash that followed, where my colleague Hamish Hector noted the growing public consciousness — and controversy — around figures like Altman.
“It plays into this bigger realization that these figures at the very top of the AI sphere, like Sam Altman for OpenAI, Elon Musk for Grok, and Mark Zuckerberg for Meta, that maybe we should be interested in what these people are like and how they behave,” he explains.
Watch the latest podcast episode below from 42:56 to hear our recap on the current discourse around AI ethics, bias and the perspectives of the tech execs leading the conversation.
That message is very much so the stated intention for Winkelmann, who told 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 world, how Warhol talked about consumerism, pop culture, that changed how he saw those things.”
He continues, explaining that in today’s climate, our collective worldview is shaped by billionaires in tech who control the narrative with powerful algorithms.
“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.”
Beeple’s no stranger to the juncture between tech and art; he’s fronteired movements like artwork-a-day trends with his long-running project Everydays, which has seen him create and publish a new digital artwork daily since 2007. His work also helped launch the art marketplace for NFTs, and even previously gave away the photos taken by his robot dogs to audience members during an earlier appearance at the Art Basel 2025 event, some of which included QR codes that gave access to free NFTs of Beeple’s digital art.
Whether or not you agree that the installation is “art” aside, it’s a surprisingly poignant message for a project that consists of pricey robot dogs in uncannily accurate silicon masks pooping out AI slop.
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josephine.watson@futurenet.com (Josephine Watson)
