Referred to as the “Father of Video Art,” Nam June Paik (b. Gyeongseong, now Seoul, Korea, 1932 – d. Miami, 2006) developed an interest in making or arranging performative actions and musical compositions, many of which incorporated edited audiotape placed into sculptures. Bakelite Robot was produced as part of a series late in Nam June Paik’s career, when the artist was working in New York. This example is a smaller than life-size sculpture, consisting of nine vintage Bakelite radios making up the “body parts” of the robot. Found in antique stores and vintage shops, the playful colors of the radios—red, black, orange, yellow, and green combine to form a whimsical humanoid figure, that is suggestive of both primitive man and the promise of future technological advancement. Paik has removed the front dials of the radios, creating hollow spaces into which television monitors have been inserted. These television monitors screen videotape specifically developed for the artwork, composed of vintage footage from robot and science fiction films and recordings of vintage robot toys. The robot does not move, instead being frozen in motion, although the videos provide a kind of animating life force, creating a sense of movement, situated at the “joints” of the figure. Bakelite had been developed by Belgian-born chemist Leo Baekland in Yonkers, New York in 1907, and was one of the earliest plastics to be introduced into the modern home. Today, objects of the material are avidly sought by collectors for their nostalgic quality, but in its time, Bakelite was a major technological innovation. So, too, Paik plays with the idea of looking wistfully backward and hopefully forward to tomorrow.