At Art Basel Miami Beach 2025, Whitewall met with Beeple to discuss his latest artwork, Regular Animals. Certainly one of the fair’s most talked-about—and uncannily lifelike—installations of the week, it is presented as a herd of semi-autonomous robotic humanoids, resurrecting cultural giants like Andy Warhol, Pablo Picasso, Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, and others in silicone-skinned form. The piece confronts visitors with a piercing question: Who is really observing whom?
“This project reinterprets the legacy of pop portraiture, sculpture, and generative art through the lens of technology,” said Beeple. “Each robotic humanoid is not simply a static object but a fluid digital canvas whose eyes and ethos we see the world through—its memories captured, reimagined, and preserved on the blockchain… a future data set that AI will be trained on.”
Bodies With Agency: Engineering Presence and Perception
Beeple, “Regular Animals,” 2025. Courtesy of artist.
The installation’s uncanny realism begins with its remarkably crafted silicone heads—each created from platinum-cure silicone (Shore hardness 00–30), hand-sculpted, mold-cast, and individually painted with subdermal color layers. These surfaces mimic the luminosity and elasticity of human skin, giving the reanimated “regular animals” a startling presence that teeters between endearing and eerie.
“It’s capturing photos and then reinterpreting them in the style of the different people,”
-Beeple
But “Regular Animals” extends beyond sculpture. Each figure is equipped with an advanced sensing and mobility system that allows it to navigate independently. A Unitree 4D LiDAR L1 sensor offers a hemispherical 360-degree-by-90-degree field of view, enabling real-time 3D mapping, path prediction, side-follow tracking, and autonomous environmental awareness. Visitors don’t merely view the work—they enter into a shared perceptual field with it.
Beeple, “Regular Animals,” 2025. Courtesy of artist.
Servomotor-driven limbs—twelve in total—allow the bodies to shift, pivot, and rebalance with IMU-stabilized precision. Their agility, which reaches up to five meters per second in lab conditions, stands in stark contrast to the stiff gestures associated with traditional figurative replicas. These figures don’t pose; they behave.
Each robotic being also includes a built-in output system that extends its narrative: a back display with dynamic status readings, eight additional indicators that pulse with activity, and a thermal dye-sub printer (Canon Selphy CP1500) capable of producing 4 × 6 inch prints at 300 × 300 dpi. These prints—identity logs, observational “memories,” fragments of lived experience—become physical artifacts of the robot’s existence.
Life Cycles, Legacies, and the Future of Autonomy
Beeple, “Regular Animals,” 2025. Courtesy of artist.
Beeple has built lifecycle into the work, too. Each robot exists for a finite three-year span—roughly “21 dog years,” as the artist describes it. At the end of this programmed lifespan, the robot “dies,” its physical presence going still. What remains is its accumulated legacy: years of prints and a preserved ledger of memories stored permanently on the blockchain. Even as the body ceases, the identity persists.
Powering all of this is a 15,000 mAh lithium-ion battery, with an optional extended pack, offering two to four hours of active runtime. The result? Companions that behave less like static objects and more like entities with agency—living, observing, documenting, and ultimately expiring.
“We’ll be viewing the world through the lens of robots and machines and math. Certain people shape the way we view the world,”
-Beeple
“While today we command and control these mechanical companions, our collectively evolving digital and physical identities—combined with advances in robotics and AI—hint at a future where the roles may reverse,” Beeple shared. “This work probes the tension between control and autonomy, permanence and transformation, inviting us to reconsider the boundaries of art, identity, and the very nature of our relationship with technology.”
At Art Basel Miami Beach—where high-gloss spectacle increasingly converges with new media experimentation—”Regular Animals” stood out for the way it transformed viewers from passive observers into participants in a shared evolution of perception and memory.
Beeple, “Regular Animals,” 2025. Courtesy of artist.
