Beeple Studios
“Regular Animals”, by Beeple
A dystopian art installation placed the planet’s most famous billionaires and Silicon Valley’s elite at the center of the show. And in this facility, Musk and company only do m…
Robot dogs are, in themselves, a bit disturbing. But if you paste them a hyper-realistic image of a tech mogul’s face and have them literally “defecate” pieces of AI-generated art, the result is something that would make shudder the producers of Black Mirror.
That’s exactly what’s on display at , one of the most prestigious art fairs in the world.
Em Regular Animalsthe space is populated by six skin-toned robot dogseach with a detached, photo-realistic head of Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, Andy Warhol, Pablo Picasso or the installation’s author himself, the digital artist Norte–americano Mike Winkelmanbetter known as .
In the bizarre installation, every few moments, the dogs stop, stand on their hind legs and “release” a print from the rear in the format of a Polaroid photograph. A small LED screen on each dog’s back flashes “POOP MODE” while this performance takes place.
“What if the act of looking at art stopped being a one-way encounter and became part of a feedback circuit in which the work itself observes, learns and remembers us?”, asks Beeple in a presentation text that accompanies the installation.
Each of these human-dog hybrids has chambers around the headcontinuously capturing images of the environment, says . This data is used (presumably with the help of an AI imager) to create the impressions that dogs “shit”.
Just like the flow of AI-generated content flooding the internetthe so-called “Back up slop“, these digital creations are bulky.
According to the New York Post, the robots will produce, in total, 1,028 prints throughout the exhibition, of which 256 are verifiable NFTs (non-fungible tokens) that can be listed on cryptocurrency markets.
Each image is marked “Excrement Sample”. Unlike the daily sample of a flesh-and-blood dog, these have a high probability of ending up being gain monetary value over time.
Although the end result is, quite appropriately, “a piece of crap”, no two photos are exactly the same. Each stack of prints conveys an aesthetic that reflects the personality of the human head attached to the dog.
Picasso’s images appear geometricwhile those that come out of Zuckercão’s rectum look like an excerpt from a cheap Matrix imitation. More examples of the impressions, which Beeple calls “memories,” could be from the installation.
Each robot dog inspired by an artist or billionaire has its own “temperament”. Elon Musk’s, for example, is described as a “cognitive blueprint”, while Picasso’s is “proto-cubism”. Beeple’s dog, by the way, has the temperament “dystopic futurism”.
Beeple Studios
Regular Animals and their Personalities
Each one also has its own speed: slow, medium or fast. Perhaps unsurprisingly, tech moguls all fall into the “fast” category.
This dystopian delirium is the creation of Mike Winkelmann, or Beeple, an artist known for his strange images in NFT format that began to gain notoriety at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic.
In 2021, he gained global attention when a collection of 5,000 of his images went to Christie’s, in the house’s first NFT auction.
In addition to feeding nightmares, Beeple says that the main objective of this robot dog project is to draw attention to the fact that, increasingly, the visible world is made of a seemingly harmless designcreated to fulfill the vision of a small group of techno-billionaires.
This, argues the artist, contrasts with past erasin which artists played a greater role in the way reality was shaped.
“Before, we saw the world interpreted through the eyes of artists, but now Mark Zuckerberg and Elon in particular control a huge part of how we see the world,” Beeple told Page Six. “We see the world through their eyes because control very powerful algorithms who decide what we see.”
Reactions to the installation, at least so far, seem much less erudite. Online, some users describe the event as “scary”, “absurd” and “beyond the disturbing”. An Instagram user, on the other hand, confessed that “want to have one”, referring to the dog-human hybrid.
Apparently, he’s not the only one. Page Six notes that all of the robots on display have already been sold, so 100 thousand dollars each. It is not known who the dogs’ new owners are, but many Silicon Valley moguls and artists with deep pockets were present at Art Basel.
There are those who say, however, that buying these works of art for big tech billionaires to have is a waste of money; just buy or use some of their products.
