Beeple’s robotic beasties—first unveiled as a questionably crowd-drawing spectacle at Art Basel Miami Beach last December—are heading to a museum.
The installation, Regular Animals (2025), will be presented at the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin from April 29 to May 10, coinciding with Gallery Weekend Berlin. The work features a pack of porcine-robotic quadrupeds fitted with grotesquely lifelike heads modeled after figures including Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, Andy Warhol, Pablo Picasso, and the artist himself.
Originally staged inside a plexiglass pen at Art Basel’s new digital-art section, the machines roam the space, capturing their surroundings with built-in cameras. Each “dog” processes what it sees through an A.I. filter styled to the visual language associated with whichever figure’s head it wears. The resulting images are then printed and ejected from the robots’ rear-ends for visitors to collect.
The installation quickly became one of the fair’s most talked-about works, drawing crowds who gathered around the enclosure waiting for the moment one of the creatures would produce a print—a moment that often prompted cheers and laughter from onlookers.
Curator Lisa Botti told Artnet News the Berlin presentation reflects a broader effort by museums to engage more directly with the cultural and political implications of artificial intelligence and emerging technologies. Cultural institutions, she said, cannot remain outside conversations about systems that increasingly shape economies, politics, and everyday life.
Beeple—whose real name is Mike Winkelmann—first gained international attention during the NFT boom when his digital collage Everydays: The First 5,000 Days sold at Christie’s for $69 million in 2021. The Berlin project continues the artist’s shift from online spectacle toward increasingly high-profile institutional presentations.
The robotic dogs will also be shown alongside Nam June Paik’s Andy Warhol Robot (1994), a video sculpture from the collection of the Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg.
Seen one way, the installation is pure slapstick: a pen of machines with celebrity faces wandering aimlessly before periodically producing images from their backsides. Seen another, it is a perversely literal model of the algorithmic present: machines that watch the world through tiny cameras, reinterpret it instantly through stylistic filters, and spit out the results as if meaning were just another form of waste management. Meanwhile, everyone watches, eyes glazed, through their cell phones before scrambling to pick up a doggie-bagged souvenir.
