Beeple’s robotic monster – which debuted at Art Basel in Miami Beach last December to a questionable draw of crowds – is now headed to a museum.
Install, common animals (2025), will be on display at the Neues Nationalgalerie in Berlin from April 29 to May 10, coinciding with Berlin Gallery Weekend. The piece features a group of pig robot quadrupeds with eerily lifelike heads modeled after the likes of Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, Andy Warhol, Pablo Picasso and the artist himself.
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Originally displayed inside a Plexiglas pen in Art Basel’s new digital art area, the machines roam the space, capturing their surroundings with built-in cameras. Each “dog” processes what it sees through an AI filter styled to relate to the visual language associated with whatever character’s head it’s wearing. The resulting image is then printed out and popped out of the robot’s backend for visitors to collect.
The installation quickly became one of the most talked about pieces at the fair, attracting crowds who gathered around the paddock waiting for the moment one of the creatures produced a print, a moment that often elicited cheers and laughter from onlookers.
Curator Lisa Botti told Art Network News The Berlin display reflects the museum’s broader efforts to engage more directly with the cultural and political implications of artificial intelligence and emerging technologies. She said cultural institutions cannot stay out of conversations about systems that increasingly shape economics, politics and daily life.
Beeple (real name is Mike Winkelmann) first came to international attention during the NFT craze when his digital collages Daily: First 5,000 days The work sold at Christie’s in 2021 for $69 million. The Berlin project continues the artist’s shift from online spectacle to increasingly high-profile institutional presentations.
The robot dogs will also be on display alongside Nam June Paik’s robot dogs. Andy Warhol Robot (1994), video sculpture from the collection of the Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg.
From one perspective, the installation is pure farce: a machine bearing a famous face wanders aimlessly, then periodically produces images from its back. From another perspective, it’s a perversely literal model of algorithmic presentation: machines looking at the world through tiny cameras, instantly reinterpreting it through stylistic filters, and spitting out results as if meaning was just another form of waste management. Meanwhile, everyone watched glassy-eyed on their phones before scrambling to grab a souvenir in a doggy bag.
