Robot dogs with Musk and Zuckerberg heads roam around Berlin museum in
Beeple's new exhibit
[April 29, 2026]
By FANNY BRODERSEN and CLAUDIA CIOBANU
BERLIN (AP) — Robot dogs with hyper-realistic silicone heads modeled
after world-renowned figures — including Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg,
Jeff Bezos, Andy Warhol and Pablo Picasso — can be seen roaming around a
Berlin museum, occasionally “pooing” printed images of their
surroundings which they've previously captured with integrated cameras.
The animals are part of an interactive installation by American artist
Beeple (Mike Winkelmann) currently showing at Berlin's Neue
Nationalgalerie.
Each printed image shows a snippet of reality transformed by AI to
resemble the personality of the dog or, in other words, the worldview of
the human figure on its shoulders (i.e., the Picasso dog will produce
images in Cubist style and Warhol's in pop art).
It's a commentary on how our perceptions are shaped by algorithms and
technology platforms, the organizers of the exhibition write in the
description of the event.
“In the past, our view of the world was shaped in part by how artists
saw the world,” Beeple told the AP. “How Picasso painted changed how we
saw the word, how Warhol talked about consumerism, pop culture, that
changed how he saw those things.”
Now our view of the world is shaped by tech billionaires who own
powerful algorithms that decide what we see and what we don’t see, the
artist added.
“That's an immense amount of power that I don’t think we’ve fully
understood, especially because when they want to make a change, they
don’t need to lobby the U.N. They don’t need to get something through
Congress or the EU, they just wake up and change these algorithms.”
The dogs also wear heads in Beeple’s own image.
Lisa Botti, the curator of the exhibition in Berlin, said that
artificial intelligence was one of the phenomena most impacting our
lives today and that “museums are the places where society can reflect”
on such transformations, which is why she wanted to have Beeple’s work
shown.
The work, entitled “Regular Animals,” was first shown at Art Basel Miami
Beach 2025.
Beeple is a graphic designer from South Carolina who does a variety of
digital artwork. He is one of the founders of the “everyday” movement in
3D graphics: For years, he has been creating a picture every day and
posting it online without missing a single day.
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A Robot in the likeness of Kim Jong Un displayed at the installation
titled Regular Animals by artist Beeple, Mike Winkelmann, at the
Neue Nationalgalerie museum in Berlin, Germany, Tuesday, April 28,
2026. (AP Photo/Markus Schreiber)
 According to Christie's, he is the
third most expensive living artist to sell at auction, after David
Hockney and Jeff Koons.
In the spring of 2021, Christie’s opened bidding for Beeple's
digital collage entitled “Everydays: The First 5000 Days,” with the
sale ultimately closing at over $69 million. The auction house
described the artwork as “critiques of modern society, the
government and social media” in the form of “grotesque, dystopian
futures, often featuring celebrities like Donald Trump and Kanye
West.”
Christie’s said the sale marked the first time a major auction house
offered a digital-only artwork with a non-fungible token as a
guarantee of its authenticity, as well as the first time
cryptocurrency has been used to pay for an artwork at auction.
Non-fungible tokens, known as NFTs, are electronic identifiers
confirming a digital collectible is real by recording the details on
a digital ledger known as a blockchain. The tokens have swept the
online collecting world recently, an offshoot of the boom in
cryptocurrencies.
At the Art Basel 2025 event, Beeple gave away the photos pooed by
his dogs to audience members, accompanied by a certificate that read
“100% organic GMO-free dog shit.” Some prints had QR codes that gave
access to free NFTs, which in practice meant Beeple was giving away
his digital art for free for people (sometimes the subjects of the
photos themselves) to potentially monetize.
——
Ciobanu reported from Warsaw, Poland.
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