I’ve seen plenty of horrifying things in my life, but this latest unnerving sight is gonna haunt me for a while. The sight of billionaires existing is bad enough on its own, but I think seeing hyper-realistic mockups of their faces attached to photo-shitting robot dogs might be worse?
Artist Mike “Beeple” Winklmann has created an installation at Berlin’s Neue Nationalgalarie that has robot dogs walking around the museum and pooping out printed photos of their surroundings taken with a camera inside. However, what really elevates them to nightmare fuel territory is that they also have silicone heads attached that look unsettlingly like those of people like Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, and Jeff Bezos. (There are other, non-billionaire public figures in the mix, too, like artists Pablo Picasso and Andy Warhol. Images these dogs shit out have been distorted by AI to reflect the signature styles of the artists. So Picasso’s dog poops out Cubist style photos, while Warhol’s are made to look like pop art.)
The installation is meant to be a commentary on how powerful people inform how the rest of us see the world, and while art was once one of the primary avenues through which people experienced and interpreted the world, nowadays tech billionaires like Musk and Bezos control public perception through their money and influence.
“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. They don’t need to get something through Congress or the EU, they just wake up and change these algorithms,” Beeple told the AP.
While horrifying to look at, the “Regular Animals” installation does communicate what it’s trying to get across. I’m just glad these robot dogs don’t have animatronics in their faces so we don’t get another layer of uncanny valley added to this whole thing. It’s a good thing this isn’t in NYC right now because if I was in a museum and saw a dog made to look like Elon Musk coming my way I would likely instinctually punt it across the room in fear.