Who remembers Beeple? Or rather: who would have ever imagined that, after making headlines during the NFT boom, he would return to spark discussion with robot dogs that defecate images? It could only happen in Miami, during Art Basel, the perfect setting for this kind of attraction, which has already gone viral.
Regular Animals is Beeple’s latest provocation: a plexiglass enclosure where quadruped robots, masked as Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Andy Warhol, Picasso, Jeff Bezos, and Beeple himself, wander like creatures pulled from a pop-tech nightmare. And the hyperreal masks created by Landon Meier are so unsettling they look alive. The robots record what they see through micro-cameras and, at a certain point, flip onto their backs and eject a print in the style of the character they’re wearing. It has everything: satire, performance, and that hint of dystopia that so perfectly reflects our times.
The audience? Hypnotized. Many arrive after seeing a video on Instagram and watch the installation only through their phones. The moment the robot with Zuckerberg’s face “produces” its image triggers a collective, almost cathartic enthusiasm. In fact, each robot had already been sold for as much as $100,000 on the very first day.
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Beeple, once again, turns contemporary anxiety – AI, surveillance, overstimulation – into something that takes advantage of the very system it makes fun of. And he even makes us laugh, perhaps in spite of ourselves. To truly understand the machines that are reshaping the present, sometimes all it takes is watching one do the most absurd and human thing possible: producing an image out of nothing.
