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At Art Basel Miami this year, digital artist Beeple introduced an installation that feels all at once humorous, unsettling, and strangely inevitable. His work, Regular Animals, features a pack of animatronic robot dogs fitted with hyperrealistic silicone masks of figures who loom large over our cultural and technological landscapes: Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, Pablo Picasso, Andy Warhol, and even Beeple himself. The dogs pace, pause, and then poop printed images created through on-site photography and AI.
The humor is immediate. But beneath the absurdity lies carefully sharpened satire. Beeple directs our attention to the fact that much of contemporary life is mediated through the tools and platforms created by these tech giants. Our sense of the world, our news, culture, communities, is filtered through algorithms designed by a handful of individuals whose silhouettes are now stretched over the bodies of robots. The dogs’ mechanical movements exaggerate this truth: they don’t create meaning; they simply circulate images, mirror the crowd, and spit out content. The joke lands because it is uncomfortably real.
What makes Regular Animals particularly compelling is its hybrid nature. It is not purely sculpture, performance, or digital art, but a convergence of all three. By using robotics, AI image processing, photography, printmaking, and NFTs, this installation functions as a living organism that generates its own output. It is art that exists in a state of flux, reflecting the realities of a world where physical experience and digital production are inseparable. Even the robots’ programmed “lifespan” adds a poetic note about obsolescence in the fast-moving tech world.
The most ironic twist is how quickly the robots were snapped up by high-end collectors, each selling for around $100,000. A piece meant to critique power and wealth is immediately absorbed into the very ecosystem it lampoons. The prints, once literal punchlines, become coveted objects. It’s a cycle that reveals the strange self-awareness of the contemporary art market: critique and commodity existing side by side, often indistinguishable.
Condensed to its essence, Regular Animals is a funny, unsettling portrait of the world we live in—one where art, technology, and influence are tightly intertwined. Beeple’s robot dogs don’t just parody the figures they depict; they invite us to question the systems that turn both images and individuals into consumable products.
To keep up to date with the innovative artist’s work, you can follow Beeple on Instagram (a social media network owned by Mark Zuckerberg).
At this year’s Art Basel Miami, artist Beeple transforms tech titans into robot dogs.
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The installation, titled Regular Animals, reveals the absurdities shaping contemporary culture and the art world today.
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