"The installation, Regular Animals by Beeple (a.k.a. Mike Winkelmann), is part satire, part dystopia, part slapstick theater. In it, a pen of robot dogs (or is it pigs?) have been fitted with grotesquely lifelike heads of Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Pablo Picasso, Andy Warhol, Jeff Bezos, and Beeple himself. They wander, they twitch, they clash-and then, at intervals likely engineered for maximum dramatic tension, they tip backward and eject a printed image from their backsides."
"Beeple, whose practice often makes the symbolic embarrassingly literal, has built a working model of our algorithmic present: machines that see the world through tiny cameras, reinterpret it instantly, and spit out the results as if meaning were just another form of waste management. Kept in a thick plexiglass pen, the robots continuously capture their surroundings and output images in the style of the head they wear, mirroring the way digital platforms nudge billions toward seeing reality through curated lenses."
"Surveillance meets celebrity meets cosplay. The whole installation plays like a Philip K. Dick fever dream. But the real drama is in the faces of the people watching. Among them was Courtney Karnez, a visitor who had rushed to see the installation after glimpsing it on Instagram. She found herself glued to the pen's perimeter, transfixed by the uncanny liveness of the things."
Regular Animals places robot dogs or pigs with lifelike celebrity heads inside a plexiglass pen where they wander, clash, twitch, and periodically eject printed images. The machines capture their surroundings through tiny cameras and instantly reinterpret what they see into stylistically specific images tied to the head they wear, producing Warhol-esque or Picasso-like prints. The installation frames surveillance, celebrity, and cosplay as a satirical, dystopian spectacle that mirrors how digital platforms curate perception. Audience reactions range from bemusement to transfixed attention, revealing the uneasy blend of uncanny liveness and platform-driven spectacle.
Read at ARTnews.com
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