Digital artist Mike Winkelman, known as Beeple, has put himself at the center of the pack with his latest viral installation at Art Basel Miami Beach — literally — and there’s still time to see it until Sunday.
Their “Regular Animals” project includes a $100,000 robotic dog with hyper-realistic heads resembling art giants Pablo Picasso and Andy Warhol, as well as Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos. The robot dogs roam around in a plexiglass pen, capturing images via chest-mounted cameras that are processed by AI and printed from their headquarters, According to WSJOf the prints produced, 256 included QR codes that provided free NFTs to collectors, distributed in bags labeled “excrement sample,”
Beeple also included himself in this elite group, a move the Charleston-based artist himself called “ballsy.” He told the Journal that his self-portrait of a dog was the first to sell, which surprised even Beeple.
This project marks at least the second time that Winckelmann has become a central figure in the art world. Four years ago, his digital collage was sold at Christie’s $69 millionHelping fuel the NFT boom that would peak a year later before massively imploding.
