With movies such as The Gold Rush, Modern Times and The Great Dictator, Charlie Chaplin as a comic actor and a movie director continuously commented on the issue of recovering humanity in the age of materialism. In his masterpiece Modern Times, Chaplin depicted a society dominated by capitalism and machine civilization, and criticized the loss of humanity in his typical way of lyrical satire. Nam June Paik was also preoccupied with the issues of humanized technology and the harmony of humans and technologies; therefore it was natural for Paik to represent Chaplin in his robot sculpture. The body of Charlie Chaplin is composed of a vintage monitor, old television sets and radios, and the light bulbs reminiscent of gas lamps in Chaplin’s films comprise its two hands, which has an old-world atmosphere delivering nostalgia for the era of black and white films. Five monitors show the edited scenes from Chaplin’s movies.
