How’s this for a sign of the times: fresh out of a legendary run in the NFT space, the digital artist Mike Winkelmann — better known by the cutesy mononym Beeple — has a new art installation featuring robot dogs with human heads.
And these aren’t just any old robotic abominations. Winkelmann’s not-so-subtle twist lies in his choice of heads: billionaire tech moguls like Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, and Jeff Bezos.
The installation is called “Regular Animals,” and is currently showing at the ever-buzzy Art Basel Miami Beach. There are at least eight flesh-colored robot dogs, each fitted with its own hyper-realistic human head. On top of the billionaires, other figures included artists like Andy Warhol, Pablo Picasso, Andy Warhol and even Winkelmann himself, per The Art Newspaper.
All the dogs have sold to private buyers at an astonishing price of $100,000 per — except the Bezos, which the artist evidently didn’t put up for sale. For now, they’re all living as a pack, jittering around in a specially-made pen.
And like real animals in a cage, the robot dogs excrete waste. According to The Art Newspaper, each dog is fitted with a camera and a printer. At regular intervals, the dogs will poop out a certificate of authenticity for a unique digital photo, which art patrons can buy as an NFT. It’s a group effort too, as Winkelmann told the publication: “that one reinterprets in the style of Picasso, and so on. Some of the robots produce the NFTs, some just produce prints and certificates.”
Each certificate declares that the accompanying artwork “has been tested and verified as 100 percent pure GMO-free, organic dogshit originating from a medium adult dog anus.”
“This is AI reinterpreting the images and what the humanoid is seeing,” Winkelmann explained. “There is an analogy; we’re increasingly going to view the world through AI. We’re also seeing the world through the lens of artists and tech leaders like Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg who shape what we see, probably more than anybody else.”
Winkelmann is known as the first artist to sell an NFT through an auction at Christie’s for nearly $70 million, a stunt which helped bring NFTs to a temporary zenith in late 2021 and early 2022 (however, he immediately cashed out his crypto proceeds for regular currency, citing a lack of faith in the tech.)
If “Regular Animals” is any indication, Winkelmann seems to be using his hype-gotten-gains to turn a corner into more mature work — if not in form, then at least in message.
More on robot dogs: Chinese Firefighters Using Robot Dogs With Huge Hoses Attached
