Beeple’s Viral Robot Dogs Are Headed to Berlin, With Nam June Paik’s “Andy Warhol Robot” as a Counterpoint
A pack of robot dogs that has already ricocheted across social media is about to enter a very different arena: the museum. The digital artist Beeple will present his installation “Regular Animals” at the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin, where the work’s deadpan spectacle and pointed politics will be framed against a landmark of media art history.
In “Regular Animals,” the robots move through a pen-like enclosure, roaming as if in a showroom or training yard. As they circulate, they snap photographs of cultural figures. Those images are then processed through AI systems and transformed into stylized outputs that echo each figure’s recognizable visual language. The results are printed from the robots’ rear ends, producing take-away sheets for visitors to collect.
Beeple also appears inside the installation as a silicone and robotic version of himself, extending the work’s interest in authorship, automation, and the uneasy intimacy between human bodies and machine behavior.
The artist has positioned the project as a critique of contemporary power and the infrastructures that shape public perception. “Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk own algorithms that control what we see and decide how we see the world,” Beeple said in a press statement. “When they want to make a change, they don’t have to lobby the UN, they don’t have to go to Congress, they just make a change.”
At the Neue Nationalgalerie, “Regular Animals” will be shown alongside Nam June Paik’s “1994 Andy Warhol Robot.” Paik, the South Korean artist widely regarded as a foundational figure in video and media art, built the human-like sculpture from film cameras, tape reels, and television sets. The work nods to American Pop artist and filmmaker Andy Warhol, whose practice dissected mass media, celebrity, and the mechanics of reproduction. Warhol’s signature Campbell soup cans and Brillo soap pad boxes appear within Paik’s construction, underscoring the feedback loop between consumer imagery and cultural mythmaking.
Seen together, the pairing offers a compressed timeline of art’s long conversation with technology: Paik’s analog-era assemblage of broadcast hardware and Pop iconography set against Beeple’s AI-mediated image production and robotic performance. The juxtaposition also sharpens the question both artists circle in different registers: who controls the channels through which images become power?
The museum will also host a public program tied to the presentation. On Tuesday, April 28, Beeple will appear in an artist talk with curator and art historian Carolyn Christov-Bakagiev and Lisa Botti, a curator at the Neue Nationalgalerie.
“Regular Animals” was previously shown at Art Basel Miami Beach 2025, where its combination of slapstick mechanics and institutional critique drew crowds. In Berlin, the work’s provocation will land in a setting built for longer looking, and for the kind of historical comparison that can turn a viral moment into a more durable argument about how images are made, circulated, and governed.
