BERLIN — An interactive installation by American digital artist Beeple featuring robot dogs with hyper-realistic silicone heads opened at Berlin's Neue Nationalgalerie. The work, titled "Regular Animals," features robotic animals modeled after figures including Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, Andy Warhol and Pablo Picasso roaming the gallery space.

The robot dogs use integrated cameras to capture their surroundings, then occasionally excrete printed images of those scenes. Each printed image shows a snippet of reality transformed by artificial intelligence to resemble the personality of the dog or the worldview of the human figure on its shoulders, with the Picasso dog producing images in a Cubist style and the Warhol dog producing images in pop art. Some of the dogs also wear heads modeled in Beeple's own image. The exhibition organizers wrote that the installation is a commentary on how perceptions are shaped by algorithms and technology platforms.

"In the past, our view of the world was shaped in part by how artists saw the world," said Beeple, whose given name is Mike Winkelmann. "How Picasso painted changed how we saw the world, how Warhol talked about consumerism, pop culture, that changed how he saw those things."

He drew a contrast with the power held by today's technology executives. "That's an immense amount of power that I don't think we've fully understood, especially because when they want to make a change, they don't need to lobby the U.N.," Beeple said. "They don't need to get something through Congress or the EU, they just wake up and change these algorithms."

Lisa Botti, the curator of the Berlin exhibition, said she wanted to show Beeple's work because artificial intelligence is one of the phenomena most impacting lives today. "Museums are the places where society can reflect," Botti said.

"Regular Animals" was first shown at Art Basel Miami Beach 2025, where Beeple gave away the printed photos to audience members, accompanied by a certificate describing the prints as organic and GMO-free. Some of the prints carried QR codes that gave access to free non-fungible tokens, allowing recipients to potentially monetize the digital art.

Beeple is a graphic designer from South Carolina. According to Christie's, he is the third most expensive living artist to sell at auction, after David Hockney and Jeff Koons. In the spring of 2021, Christie's opened bidding for his digital collage "Everydays: The First 5000 Days," and the sale closed at over $69 million. Christie's said the sale marked the first time a major auction house offered a digital-only artwork with a non-fungible token as a guarantee of its authenticity and the first time cryptocurrency was used to pay for an artwork at auction.