Robots in the likeness of Elon Musk, foreground, and Jeff Bezos, left, are displayed at the installation titled Regular Animals by artist Beeple, Mike Winkelmann, at the Neue Nationalgalerie museum in Berlin, Germany, Tuesday (local time). AP-Yonhap
Robot dogs with hyper-realistic silicone heads modeled after world-renowned figures — including Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, Andy Warhol and Pablo Picasso — can be seen roaming around a Berlin gallery, occasionally “pooing” printed images of their surroundings which they've previously captured with integrated cameras.
The animals are part of an interactive installation by American artist Beeple (Mike Winkelmann) currently showing at Berlin's New National Gallery .
Each printed image shows a snippet of reality transformed by AI to resemble the personality of the dog or, in other words, the worldview of the human figure on its shoulders (i.e., the Picasso dog will produce images in Cubist style and Warhol's in pop art).
It's a commentary on how our perceptions are shaped by algorithms and technology platforms, the organizers of the exhibition write in the description of the event.
“In the past, our view of the world was shaped in part by how artists saw the world,” Beeple told the AP. “How Picasso painted changed how we saw the world, how Warhol talked about consumerism, pop culture, that changed how he saw those things.”
Now our view of the world is shaped by tech billionaires who own powerful algorithms that decide what we see and what we don’t see, the artist added.
“That's an immense amount of power that I don’t think we’ve fully understood, especially because when they want to make a change, they don’t need to lobby the U.N. They don’t need to get something through Congress or the EU, they just wake up and change these algorithms.”
The dogs also wear heads in Beeple’s own image.
Lisa Botti, the curator of the exhibition in Berlin, said that artificial intelligence was one of the phenomena most impacting our lives today and that “museums are the places where society can reflect” on such transformations, which is why she wanted to have Beeple’s work shown.
Source: Korea Times News
