Beeple Transforms Musk, Bezos, and Zuckerberg into Robot Dogs that 'Excrete' Prints and NFTs

A pack of robot dogs roams a plexiglass enclosure, each with a silicone head that replicates the face of one of the most powerful men on the planet: Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, as well as Pablo Picasso, Andy Warhol, and the artist himself, walk on mechanical four legs, photographing visitors with integrated cameras, and at regular intervals, they squat and excrete a print. This is Regular Animals, the installation with which Mike Winkelmann, artistically known as Beeple, dominated the scene at Art Basel Miami Beach, the most important contemporary art fair in the United States and one of the most prestigious events in the global art circuit. Winkelmann's installation was included in the Zero10 section dedicated to digital art.

Algorithms with Paws
The mechanics of the work are deliberately brutal in their simplicity. Each robot captures images of the environment and visitors, processes them through artificial intelligence, and returns them as physical prints whose visual style varies according to the character the robot “wears”: essential black-and-white reduction for Musk, saturated colors and references to the metaverse for Zuckerberg, cubist decompositions for Picasso, pop palettes for Warhol. Among the produced prints, 256 bear a QR code that allows one to redeem a free NFT, packaged in bags labeled “Excrement Sample.” The metaphor leaves no room for interpretation: digital platforms collect, digest, and return a reality that is already filtered, shaped according to algorithmic logics that rarely become visible.

The hyper-realistic and disturbing masks bear the signature of Landon Meier, a master in the field, and are mounted on commercial-grade quadruped robots.
As can be seen on the official website of the initiative, the installation questions the viewer's gaze: who is watching whom? The robots photograph, the AI selects, and the prints certify. It is the production chain of digital consent told with the irony of a contemporary bestiary.
Each specimen of Regular Animals has an operational duration of three years, which Beeple jokingly describes as “21 years in dog years,” applying the old rule that one human year equals seven years for a dog. At the end of this period, the robot ceases to function and what remains is its legacy: an immutable archive of prints and memories recorded on the blockchain. The body shuts down, the digital identity persists. A choice that transforms the work into a commentary on the artificial permanence of online identities, even after the bodies stop acting. Each robot was sold for $100,000, totaling around $1.2 million; the new owners will be able to market the prints and NFTs produced during the machine's lifecycle.

For those following the digital art market, Beeple's name is already synonymous with a historical fracture: in 2021, his work Everydays: The First 5000 Days was sold by Christie's for $69.3 million, effectively opening the NFT market to institutional collecting. We had previously written about the NFT phenomenon and its impact on digital art. With Regular Animals, Winkelmann takes a further step: he brings the critique off the screen, puts it on four legs, and allows it to walk among the people.
The act of photographing is delegated to machines that carry the faces of those who metaphorically built, financed, or made those machines culturally dominant. The robots do not merely snap: they select, interpret, and “sign” the images with a predefined aesthetic, exactly as social network algorithms do every time they decide what to show us and in what order. Regular Animals is not a shouted denunciation: it is a disturbing performance that works because it takes the luxury of seeming absurd, and in doing so reveals something very precise about the workings of digital power.