• Digital artist Beeple created robot dogs wearing eerily lifelike famous faces.
  • The lineup includes Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, and Andy Warhol.
  • Each piece uses Hyperflesh silicon to achieve strikingly realistic skin textures.

Seeing a robotic dog walking through the streets of San Francisco with the head of Elon Musk feels like the sort of nightmare you’d expect to wake up from. However, this nightmare played out in real life as part of a bizarre art installation that spilled onto the city’s streets last week.

The autonomous dog was set free near Oracle Park last Wednesday as digital artist Beeple promotes his new ‘Infinite_Loop’ exhibition, opening on April 18 at the Palo Alto digital art center Node. Shockingly, the dog with Musk’s head isn’t the only one that Beeple has created for his ‘Regular Animals’ display.

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Each autonomous dog is based on the Unitree Go2, which is available for purchase for just under $3,000. Beeple has created several of them, including ones with life-like faces of Andy Warhol, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, Pablo Picasso, and Beeple himself. The silicon masks were made in collaboration with Hyperflesh.

“Regular Animals reinterprets the legacy of pop portraiture, sculpture, and generative art through the lens of technology. Each robotic humanoid is not a static object but a fluid digital canvas — its memories captured, reimagined, and preserved on the blockchain,” according to Node. The bizarre robots premiered at Art Basel in Miami last December.

A Dystopian Hell

Videos of the Elon Musk robot dog have been spreading across social media after it was filmed out and about in San Francisco. It’s terrifying, as if to show how Musk has become so rich and powerful that he’s now involved in the lives of billions through his companies, and always keeping a watchful eye on his minions. The robot dog can even wave, and while its face is static, it arguably expresses more emotion than Musk himself.

Mike Winkelmann, better known as Beeple, made international headlines in 2021 when he sold an NFT featuring a collage of over 5,000 digital pieces of art for $69 million.