Art Basel Miami took a bizarre turn this week after digital artist Mike Winkelmann, known as Beeple, revealed a pack of robot dogs with lifelike silicone faces of famous tech leaders and artists.
The robots carried the faces of Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, Pablo Picasso, and Andy Warhol.
The artwork, titled Regular Animals, showed the robot dogs walking around inside a pen.
Every so often, they leaned back and “pooped” printed photos from their tail ends, while a screen on their backs flashed “poop mode.”
The mix of human-like faces and dog bodies created an eerie, futuristic scene that felt straight out of a sci-fi nightmare.
Two other robots looked like Beeple himself, complete with his hairstyle and glasses.
Beeple stayed inside the enclosure on opening day, collecting the prints and handing them to visitors.
He told CNN that each robot was taking pictures and reinterpreting the world based on the character whose face it wore.
The results were shown in different art styles, one looked like Warhol’s pop art, another like Picasso’s abstract work.
He added that the tech-billionaire robots carried a message about modern life: “We’re increasingly seeing the world through the lens of how they would like us to see it, because they control these powerful algorithms.”
Online, people reacted with shock, humour, and concern.
“Imagine waking up to see a mini-Elon Musk robot dog at your bedside,” wrote Instagram user Mykell Hilliard.
Another user, Jay London, said, “This is getting real creepy real fast.” And Frank joked, “Me back in 2015 thinking cars would be flying by 2025.”
Beeple’s strange robot dogs left many people amused, disturbed, and thinking about the future.