A Dog with the Face of Elon Musk Kneeled in Front of Me, and It Wasn’t a Dream—Beeple in Berlin

They were running around in a sort of pen, super awkward, a bit helpless. Printing polaroids with their rear ends. And these faces: made of silicone, extremely naturalistic. There were Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, Andy Warhol, Pablo Picasso, and Beeple (Mike Winkelmann) himself in the pen.

Seeing these weird humanoid robots made me curious, but also sort of disgusted. It is a total cognitive dissonance; the brain gets completely lost–is it a dog? Is it a human? How do I interact?

Museums are agents of change, said curator Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, and as we live in the era of AI and new technologies, they should be present in museums. She mentioned older examples of automation in modern art and the concept of angelic figures. The show of Beeple’s Regular Animals is accompanied by the presentation of Nam June Paik’s Andy Warhol Robot from 1994.

The robotic dogs are supposed to be live sculptures interacting with the outside world using AI capabilities, only that they are not. Regarding whether they could learn, Beeple said they are like regular dogs and mainly try not to bump into anything. Also, they are in the form of dogs rather than humans because it was easier to produce.

The hyper-realistic faces were made by Landon Meier, known as Hyperflesh. As Beeple writes on his Instagram account, “A few years ago, I saw some INSANE masks being used for cosplay/Halloween. I thought these would be amazing as living sculptures that gave these personalities new context…”

So we have robotic dogs with amazing-quality Halloween masks roaming the museum and pooping photographs. Beeple says, “We are not prepared for the future.” Certainly, I am not.

The author was attending the meeting with the artist and curators on April 28, 2026 for the opening of the show Beeple. Regular Animals in the Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin, Germany.