Some unsettling dog-bots, one with an artificial face of Elon Musk, are now on display in a Palo Alto art center.
The little androids had been spotted scurrying around San Francisco earlier this month.
NODE, the name of the Palo Alto digital art center, says they are “proud” to exhibit the bot, which has four legs with a Musk head attached to it with no facial expression. A video shows the tan-colored bot do little but trot around and wave at people.
“NODE is a home for artists defining digital culture today. Beeple’s Regular Animals are a physical embodiment of that culture, and we’re proud to bring a piece of it here to Silicon Valley,” a NODE representative told The San Francisco Chronicle.
“Sending Elon into the streets is a way to bring that energy into public life ahead of the exhibition opening,” they added. “The reaction has been exactly what Beeple’s work does so well: it stops people in their tracks and gets them talking.”
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A deeply unsettling robot dog bearing the eerily realistic face of Elon Musk was spotted mid-walkies on the streets of San Francisco this week. pic.twitter.com/I0rGDNoEwE
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The head is part of the “INFINITE_LOOP.” event, which NODE says serves as “a mid-career survey of the work of Mike Winkelmann, known globally as Beeple.”
“INFINITE_LOOP asks what happens when repetition becomes a kind of infinity,” it says. “The exhibition extends this principle beyond the artist himself, inviting visitors to exhibit their own digital artworks alongside the main installation, blurring the line between spectator and creator.”
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The Musk head will be part of the “Regular Animals” exhibition, which also includes a robot with the likeness of Meta head Mark Zuckerberg. The creators plan to keep the robots alive for three years, they said, before they die and preserve the “dog’s” memories.
“Regular Animals reinterprets the legacy of pop portraiture, sculpture, and generative art through the lens of technology,” NODE said.
“Each robotic humanoid is not a static object but a fluid digital canvas — its memories captured, reimagined, and preserved on the blockchain. After three years — twenty-one ‘dog years’ — each robot will ‘die,’ with all memories from its life preserved forever on-chain.”
It’s unclear if Musk approved of the art space using his likeness. Beeple previously showcased the robots at an event in Miami late last year.
The California Post reached out to Beeple for comment.




