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Maybe you’ve seen some unusual “Lost Dog” posters around lately, featuring an image of a creature with a robotic body and, say, Mark Zuckerberg’s head (you may have even encountered one of the “dogs” itself out on a walk)? If you follow the information on those flyers, it will lead you to 180 University Ave., home of NODE, the new nonprofit foundation and hotspot for digital art in downtown Palo Alto.
NODE exists “to give digital artists a physical place to show their work,” Executive Director Phil Mohun said in a recent interview. And according to Mohun, “gallery” isn’t exactly the right term for it, nor is museum. “A network is maybe the closest explanation of how we think about ourselves,” he suggested.
Whatever you call it, NODE offers a place for the public to encounter digital art in a curated environment, and it came into being because, in conversations with artists around the world, “it became apparent that there wasn’t a space specifically designed for the type of art that they were creating,” Mohun said, “Because there’s a lot of requirements. There’s the need for displays. You need to have a team in house who understands what they’re doing. You need to have a collector and audience community who takes it seriously and wants to engage with it. And we felt like Palo Alto was the perfect place to do that.”
So, what exactly does the phrase “digital art” mean to the NODE team?
“We primarily work with artists who use digital tools to create the artwork, but it doesn’t necessarily mean that all of the artworks are 100% digital,” Mohun said. Some, he noted, have a physical component. Many, but not all, use blockchain technology.
“I think that the key distinction is that many of the artists, they use computation, they use software programs, they use networks as a key part of the medium rather than something to distribute the artwork afterwards,” he said.
NODE was founded in 2024 and received its $25 million foundational grant from local investors (and art collectors) Micky Malka and Becky Kleiner. Its Palo Alto space opened in late January of this year and its first exhibition was devoted to “CryptoPunks,” an algorithmically created collection of portraits on the Ethereum blockchain. NODE purchased the intellectual property of CryptoPunks in 2025.
NODE’s current exhibition, “Beeple: / INFINITE_LOOP” (on view through June 28), is a mid-career survey of the work of digital artist Mike Winkelmann, who works under the name Beeple and who is best known for creating and posting a new artwork every day since May 1, 2007 (“Everydays: The First 5000 Days” sold for $69.3 million in 2021). Current visitors to NODE can explore selections from Beeple’s “Everydays,” sortable by content or type, Mohun said.
And yes, there is the pack of aforementioned robot dogs, which belong to Beeple’s “Regular Animals” series. The autonomously moving dogs feature hyperrealistic latex masks of familiar faces such as Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Andy Warhol and Pablo Picasso and contain cameras. Periodically, they excrete instant photos taken of the world around them, processed by AI in a way that represents their imagined worldview – in a cubist style from the Picasso dog, for example. Each dog’s “memories” are also preserved via blockchain.
“That work is really a commentary on seeing the world through the lens of different people,” Mohun said. Half of the people represented are business and media leaders and the other half are artists, he said, “because both of them shape and control how we see the world.”
new artwork every day since May 1, 2007.
At the April 18 opening reception for the exhibition, guests were offered the printed photos, with text on the back proclaiming them “certified dogshit,” packaged in baggies labeled “excrement sample” with the caveat: “This package contains a physical embodiment of digital art, known to be disgusting to most patrons of the arts.”
Winkelmann “has said explicitly, it’s not his goal with the art to tell you what to feel. He’s not trying to come in with a certain message that he wants you to walk away with. He wants you to see something you’ve never seen before and what you take home with you is up to you,” Mohun said.
According to Winkelmann’s artist statement on “Regular Animals,” “while today we command and control these mechanical companions, our collectively evolving digital/physical identities combined with advances in robotics and AI hint at a future where the roles may reverse, suggesting a paradigm in which these entities develop their own agency, perhaps over us.”
The creatures milled about in “The Garage” space at the opening reception, inspiring fascination in viewers.
“We realized very early on that the dogs have a very high photo factor,” Mohun said. “The percentage of people that see the dogs and have to pull out their phone is close to 100%.”
Other works represented in “INFINITE_LOOP” include “Human One,” “Diffuse Control,” “Transient Bloom” and “The Tree of Knowledge.”
An installation titled “Heaven and Hell” offers hypnotic AI-generated imagery of salvation and damnation, including one of Beeple’s kinetic sculptures created using generative AI tools that were top of the line back in 2023. The works displayed on the walls and ceiling, on the other hand, were created using generative AI models “that came out as recently as 10 days ago,” Mohun said, showing how the technology has advanced in just three years.
April 18, 2026. Courtesy Felix Uribe Jr.
In a talk at Stanford University, Winkelmann discussed his use of digital tech tools, including AI.
“A huge part of my process is trying to use the latest technologies to get whatever ideas I have out as quickly as possible with as much sort of, like, control as possible,” Winkelmann said at the Stanford event. “Now, with AI, that is a lot of new tools very quickly … from image making to video making to code, and so I think diving and sort of embracing these technologies … there’s no other choice. This is not going away.” Noting that some see AI’s prevalence as harkening the “death of creativity,” Winkelmann said because of the rise of accessibility and speed of development of AI technologies, he thinks it’s “absolutely just the opposite. I think it has raised the bar for creativity so much higher.”
Prior to joining the NODE team, Mohun co-founded the touring digital-art project Bright Moments. He and his wife moved to the area in early 2025 and he spent the next year helping get NODE’s physical space — a former retail store — exhibition-ready.
“It was a design from the ground up. And I think that the way that we’ve designed NODE is as a canvas for artists,” he said. The space is made up of four rooms, each with a certain identity and capabilities, with infrastructure designed to allow artists to customize aspects such as interactivity or lighting.
The “Exhibit One” space, for example, has a 35-foot-long LED wall. An overhead ceiling grid and subfloor system allows power and data to be run anywhere in the room.
The plan is to bring in new exhibits on a seasonal basis, as well as offering additional types of programming in between. During the inaugural winter season, NODE put out an open call for artists to submit work and received 1,724 submissions, selecting 10 to show in the Palo Alto exhibition space.
“If you have a physical art space and you have paintings on the wall and you want to do another show, you have to take those paintings down, inventory them, ship the new ones in, hang them up. There’s just labor involved,” Mohun said. “With a digital art space, you can change the content on the screens instantly for no cost,” which allows emerging digital artists to have access to the same infrastructure more established artists have.
Since NODE’s opening, Mohun said he’s enjoyed meeting many new people who’ve had their curiosity piqued and wandered in.
“I’ve had dozens of conversations with longtime residents, people who are just stopping by, people who are visiting,” he said. “Most people are just curious to see something new. And I think that that is, you know, if nothing else, something that we can offer.”
NODE is open Fridays 6-10 p.m. and Saturdays and Sundays from noon to 8 p.m., 180 University Ave., Palo Alto; free; nodefoundation.com.
