Digital artist Mike Winkelmann, widely known as Beeple, sent one of his autonomous robot dogs roaming the streets of San Francisco on April 8, deploying the piece outside Oracle Park as a public stunt ahead of his upcoming mid-career survey exhibition at NODE, a digital arts nonprofit and gallery space in Palo Alto, which opens on April 18. The robot, drawn from Beeple’s installation series titled Regular Animals, features a lifelike silicone head bearing a realistic likeness of a prominent tech figure mounted on a quadruped robotic body, and its appearance on the San Francisco waterfront drew an immediate and wide reaction from passersby, with videos of the strutting machine spreading rapidly online.
Regular Animals was first unveiled at Art Basel in Miami in December, featuring robot dogs with silicone heads modelled after a range of billionaires and art world figures, including Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, Pablo Picasso, Andy Warhol, and Beeple himself, walking around in a small pen and drawing crowds at the fair. Besides raising its leg, following people, squatting, and attempting to interact with real dogs, each robot dog also captures pictures before producing a printed copy of what its front camera takes in, transmuted through an algorithm based on its subject’s visage, a feature that blurs the line between performance, technology, and satire in a way characteristic of Beeple’s broader practice. While the Art Basel presentation featured several of the figures, it was only one of the dogs that made an appearance at the San Francisco waterfront, where passersby were transfixed by the strutting machine, stopping to take pictures and pausing when the dog completed its printed output.
A NODE representative described the street deployment as a way to bring the energy of the work into public life ahead of the exhibition opening, adding that the reaction had been exactly what Beeple’s work does so well, stopping people in their tracks and getting them talking. The upcoming exhibition at NODE, titled INFINITE LOOP, will present a comprehensive mid-career survey of Beeple’s practice and is expected to include Human One, his first kinetic video sculpture, Regular Animals, and an extensive presentation of his ongoing daily drawing series titled Everydays. Beeple has been creating digital art since 2007, posting a new piece every day as part of Everydays, and in 2021 sold a compilation of 5,000 of those images as a non-fungible token for 69.3 million United States dollars, making it one of the most expensive digital artworks ever sold. Reactions to the San Francisco street appearance, both in person and online, were mixed, with some finding the piece amusing and others describing it as unsettling, a duality that sits squarely within the kind of cultural friction Beeple’s work is designed to produce.
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