Digital artist Mike Winkelmann, known as Beeple, unveiled an installation titled “Regular Animals” at Art Basel Miami Beach 2025 in the fair’s new Zero 10 digital art section, dedicated to AI and new media art. The work consists of flesh‑colored robot dogs outfitted with hyper‑realistic silicone heads of figures including Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, Andy Warhol, Pablo Picasso, and Beeple himself, roaming inside a transparent pen and interacting with visitors. As the robots move, they use onboard cameras to photograph the crowd; those images are processed by AI in the visual or ideological “style” associated with each figure and then printed and physically ejected from the dogs’ rear ends, mimicking excrement.
These printed images serve as certificates/prints linked to NFTs, some carrying QR codes that allow recipients to claim accompanying free NFTs tied to the images and the robot’s ongoing “memory” stream. Beeple describes the system as a loop in which AI “digests” what the humanoid dogs see and outputs artworks whose records are preserved on the blockchain, with each robot designed to have a finite three‑year operational “lifespan,” after which only its accumulated prints and on‑chain data remain. The installation functions as a satirical, physical‑digital hybrid commentary on algorithmic image production, surveillance, celebrity culture, and the way powerful tech platforms and AI systems mediate what people see and value as art; it also underscores how quickly such speculative work is absorbed by the market, with each robot reportedly selling for around $100,000 during the fair’s VIP preview.
✨ AI-generated background, compiled from web sources — not editorial content.
