“Becoming Robot” is an exhibit located at The Asia Society in the Upper East Side. Our group decided to go see it because Lucius actually has heard of the artist, Nam June Paik.

The exhibit was very simple. It wasn’t the robots that most of us expected it to be like. When I think of robots, I think of like those in the labs where they move around to accomplish some job, or the ones that flies into other planets and moons to collect data. Paik’s robots were different. The first “robot” we encountered was probably the closest to the prototype for the word “robot”. The robot was built with a complex intertwine of wires and metal. At one point in 1982 he had actually displayed this robot in Manhattan, but a car had bumped into it, knocking it over. In another display, he used closed-circuit TV’s (the robot) to capture objects, including a chair, a golden Buddha, etc. There was also a family of robots built out of TV, the father, the mother, and the baby. It is interesting to see Paik’s concept of a robot that was so advance for his time.

~Christopher Chong