"Imagine Elon Musk staring you down. Now imagine his head on a doglike robot as it looks at you, squats and poops out your image. This was part of an installation entitled Regular Animals at this year's Art Basel Miami Beach art fair. Viewers stood outside a pen containing robot quadrupeds with the heads of tech billionaires, famous artists and Mike Winkelmann, aka Beeplethe creator behind all this. The vibe was equal parts showroom, petting zoo and black comedy."
"The gag is crude, but the point is serious: Beeple is mocking the way tech power, and the data we unknowingly surrender, shapes what culture becomes. For now, we imagine ourselves the authors and operators of these systems, Beeple wrote in his artist statement. As robotics and AI advance toward forms of autonomy, the possibility emerges that these beings may one day claim their own interpretive authority."
"Beeple, an American digital artist whose nonfungible token (NFT) artwork sold for $69 million at Christie's in 2021, helped launch the art marketplace for such NFTs, digital items recorded on a blockchain to publicly show their ownership. Now he's contemplating our AI future. We'll be viewing the world through the lens of robots and machines and math, he said in an interview with Whitewall. Certain people shape the way we view the world."
Regular Animals is an installation of robot quadrupeds with heads of tech billionaires, famous artists and Mike Winkelmann (Beeple) exhibited at Art Basel Miami Beach. Each robot captured images of viewers with a camera; an internal computer applied AI-based styling and a compact printer ejected four-by-six-inch certificates bearing the images. The installation used crude humor to critique how technological power and the personal data people surrender shape cultural production. Beeple sold an NFT for $69 million at Christie's and helped launch the NFT art market. He predicted that humans will increasingly view the world through frameworks produced by robots, machines and algorithms, and advancing robotics and AI could enable autonomous systems to assert interpretive authority.
Read at www.scientificamerican.com
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