Hamlet Robot

In 1996 the pioneering video artist Nam June Paik used 13 vintage television sets as building blocks to create this sculpture of the tragic Prince of Denmark from William Shakespeare’s play Hamlet. Paik’s hulking giant wears the family crown, holding a royal staff in one hand and a plastic skull in the other—a playful reference to Hamlet’s dramatic soliloquy on life and death. The TV screens hypnotically pulse with Hamlet movie clips, photographs of Kronborg Castle, and old engravings. These flashing screens lure us to look, but they also evoke the dizzying speed of the electronic “information highway” (a term coined by Paik) and the breakneck pace at which we look at nearly all imagery in the modern world.