Tag Archives: Nam June Paik

New Art Exhibition Features Robot Influencer Alongside Works

Today 10 October, Vilnius’ leading contemporary MO Museum has opened How to Feel Real. Art, Technology and Us, exploring how technology is changing the way we experience reality. This opening also features an unusual guest: Poland’s viral humanoid robot influencer Edward Warchocki.

●       Humanoid robot Edward will move through the museum and interact with visitors, respond to artworks, and take part in the opening program.
 

●       The showcase is not a traveling exhibition, but developed through an intensive co-creative process in collaboration with Germany’s ZKM | Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe, one of Europe’s leading institutions for media art.
 

●       It brings together more than 40 artists, from media art pioneers to contemporary artists working with AI, algorithms, and immersive technologies.
 

●       Among them are Nam June Paik with his famous Internet Dream, Christa Sommerer, Laurent Mignonneau, and Anna Ridler.

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Humanoid Influencer Edward Warchocki Is Heading to New Vilnius Exhibition, Asking What Does it Mean to Feel Real

Humanoid robot influencer Edward Warchocki at the Exhibition How to Feel Real © Mo Museum

October 2026 – Vilnius, Lithuania. Housed in a contemporary building designed by world-renowned architect Daniel Libeskind, MO Museum has become a leading force in the country’s modern cultural scene.

The new exhibition features landmark works from ZKM’s collection, which has a long-standing focus on Eastern Europe, and marks yet another collaboration with the MO Museum. How to Feel Real explores questions that are becoming increasingly urgent in a world shaped by technology: how do we feel real, and what does it mean to be alive?

One of its first visitors to see the artwork at MO Museum will be a humanoid robot from Poland.

Edward Warchocki, Poland’s first viral humanoid robot influencer, will join the MO Museum exhibition opening.

Built on a Unitree G1 humanoid platform and developed by Warsaw-based MERA Robotics, Warchocki has been given his own public persona, voice, and social media presence. In 2026, he moved from being a robotics project to an internet personality. Edward became a viral sensation after footage of him chasing wild boars through the streets of Warsaw spread online. He has since appeared in Poland’s Parliament, met senior politicians, and become a familiar figure on Polish television.

“Quite a few of the works in How to Feel Real explore artificial intelligence, automation, and the ways machines are increasingly taking on roles we once considered distinctly human. Bringing Edward into the museum is a playful extension of this idea, as his deliberately human-like and slightly absurd persona makes the questions raised by the exhibition tangible – inviting us to wonder why we are so eager to find the human in a machine,” said Milda Ivanauskienė, Director of MO Museum.

During the event, Edward will move through different spaces of the museum, interact with visitors, comment on artworks, and take part in the opening program in Lithuanian, English, and Polish languages.

Exhibition How to Feel Real © Domas Rimeika

“People keep asking me if I’m real, so when I heard about an exhibition asking what ‘real’ actually means, I thought: finally, someone is asking the right question. I’m coming to the beautiful Vilnius to see what the artists have to say – and, of course, to check whether they think I’m real,” said Edward Warchocki.

The exhibition moves beyond the familiar divide between techno-optimism and techno-pessimism. Alongside critical works about technology and power, visitors will encounter playful experiments, immersive environments and new aesthetic forms.

Organised around some of today’s most pressing themes – connection, automation, intelligence, body, and agency – the exhibition brings together works created predominantly from the 1990s to the present day. Together, they trace a conversation between artists’ early encounters with computers and the internet and contemporary responses to AI, and the growing digital mediation of everyday life.

“Our aim was to explore the latest technologies – including AI, quantum computing, robotics, and biotechnology – through the artists’ works. Art goes beyond the technology itself; it’s about broader questions regarding how we interact with technology and, thus, with the world,” said Philipp Ziegler, Head of Curatorial Department, ZKM | Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe.

More than 40 of the exhibition’s artists explore the shifting boundary between humans and technology. A definite highlight is the work Internet Dream from 1994 by media-art pioneer Nam June Paik. This massive media installation with 54 old CRT-monitors offers a glimpse into the era of the emerging global connectivity via the internet.

Another participant is the UK’s digital art studio Universal Everything, whose Infinity creates an endless stream of digital figures. Generated in real time by an algorithm, each figure combines different colours, textures, and body shapes, so no two are quite the same. The work has appeared in Germany’s ZKM, Italy’s Museo Nazionale della Scienza e della Tecnologia Leonardo da Vinci, and 180 Studios in London.

Christa Sommerer and Laurent Mignonneau are pioneers of interactive art, and their A-Volve is one of the works that established their international reputation. Visitors create virtual organisms through their own movements, then watch them interact, reproduce, and compete within a simulated ecosystem. The work won the Golden Nica for Interactive Art at Ars Electronica in 1994.

Anna Ridler from the UK similarly explores how machines learn from human-made material. In The Shell Record, she trained a generative AI system on images of shells she collected along the River Thames, turning the collection into moving-image works. The project connects the human act of collecting with the history of shells as stores of value and one of the earliest forms of currency.

How to Feel Real. Art, Technology and Us runs at MO Museum from 10 October 2026 to 29 August 2027.

For the Silo, Jarrod Barker.

Met Exhibit Will Explore Human Body & Musical Instrument Physical Connections

The exhibition will feature an interactive space for visitors to make music through body movement, as well as immersive elements, live performances, and workshops
Exhibition Dates:  June 7–Sept 27, 2026
Location: The Met Fifth Avenue, Gallery 199

(New York, April, 2026)—From clapping hands and tapping feet to beatboxing and whistling, the human body is a musical instrument. In turn, instruments often draw their form and decoration from the body. Musical Bodies, which opens on June 7 at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, will explore the multifaceted relationship between musical instruments and the human body. This is the first major exhibition to address this theme and will bring together some 130 works from around the world and across time, including musical instruments, paintings, sculptures, and drawings from The Met collection along with important international loans.

Musical Bodies was conceived as an experiential exhibition. An innovative interactive will enable visitors to create music through intuitive movements and explore the blurred boundaries between body and instrument. Large-scale projections will display newly commissioned footage of beatboxing, body percussion, tap dancing, and more by such acclaimed New York–based and international artists as tap dancer Savion Glover, Beatbox House, and whistler Molly Lewis. Special activations throughout the run of the exhibition will take place in the gallery and include musical performances from an array of artists as well as workshops that activate the body as an instrument. More details will be announced at a later date.

 “Musical instruments, which represent an important part of the Met’s collection, have long been recognized and celebrated as dynamic tools for creative expression, and also as works of art in their own right,” said Max Hollein, The Met’s Marina Kellen French Director and CEO. “This multisensory exhibition is the first to explore—through remarkable instruments, objects, and works of art—the fascinating ways in which sound, musical objects and the human form have been in conversation for millennia. Including outstanding instruments, powerful performances and immersive in-gallery experiences, Musical Bodies is a show that will resonate, fascinate and inspire.”

The exhibition is made possible by Barbara Tober, the Diane W. and James E. Burke Fund, the William Randolph Hearst Foundation, and the Gail and Parker Gilbert Fund.

Additional support is provided by Anonymous, The Dancing Tides Foundation, and the Vanguard Council.

Encompassing 4,000 years of music history and art, Musical Bodies will feature a range of objects from across the visual arts, literature, religion, pop culture, and mythology. This includes ancient Egyptian rattles, paintings by Titian and Degas, instrument-inspired apparel, and one of Prince’s most notable guitars. The ways in which the boundaries between body and instrument have been artfully blurred will be explored through visionary works such as Nam June Paik’s TV Cello; the PianoArc circular keyboard designed in collaboration with Brockett Parsons, keyboardist for Lady Gaga; and a steel guitar in the form of a crutch that was made for country music singer and songwriter Barbara Mandrell while she was recovering from an automobile crash.

Musical Bodies will include prominent works from across 10 of The Met’s curatorial departments, including over 50 instruments from the Department of Musical Instruments as well as ancient works from Egypt, 19th-century masterpieces from European Paintings, and 20th -century works from the Department of Modern and Contemporary Art. The exhibition will also feature significant loans from collectors and institutions such as the Musée de la musique (Paris), the National Music Museum (Vermillion, South Dakota), and the Royal College of Music (London). One of the earliest surviving bowed string instruments, a rare figural lira da braccio from the Kunsthistorisches Museum (Vienna), and a lavish hurdy gurdy from the Victoria & Albert Museum (London) will be shown in the United States for the first time.

“Musical Bodies first formed in my mind as a deceptively simple question: Why are so many instruments shaped and decorated like the human body?” said Bradley Strauchen-Scherer, Curator in the Department of Musical Instruments at The Met.”The quest for an answer has become an exploration of humanity through the lens of instruments and music. We find ourselves represented in these instruments because, for much of our history, music has been central to who we are and what we do. I hope this exhibition will reconnect all of us with our innate musicality and shared heritage of harmony.”

Through six thematic sections, the exhibition will illuminate the relationship between the body and musical instruments and how they serve as channels for self-exploration and expressions of culture and belief systems. Musical Bodies will also reveal how instruments are used to stand in for the body to address topics that are traditionally considered taboo, such as sex and death.


Credits and Related Content

Musical Bodies is conceived and organized by Bradley Strauchen-Scherer, Curator in the Department of Musical Instruments at The Met, assisted by Ava Valentino, Research Assistant in the Department of Musical Instruments.

A fully illustrated catalogue will accompany the exhibition and will be available for purchase from The Met Store.

The catalogue is made possible by the Mary C. and James W. Fosburgh Publications Fund.

The Met will host a variety of exhibition-related educational and public programs, including a Creative Convening, Artists on Artworks and Met Expert talks in the galleries, a music workshop, and more. Details will be announced.

Musical Bodies will be on view during the presentation of the exhibition Costume Art (May 10, 2026–January 10, 2027), which will examine the centrality of the dressed body in fashion and art. The two shows will provide visitors with distinct and engaging explorations of the body’s relationship to artistic expression.

For the Silo, Jarrod Barker.


Featured Image: Thomas Zach, Violino Harpa Forma Maxima, 1874. Wood (spruce, maple, ebony), metal strings. Collections Musée de la musique / Cliché Claude Germain, 2020. Cité de la musique-Philharmonie de Paris
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Met Exhibit Will Feature Connections Of Human Body & Musical Instruments

Brockett Parsons, keyboardist for Lady Gaga with his PianoArc.

Max Rebo and his circular keyboard. Star Wars Return of the Jedi. 1983

The exhibition will feature an interactive space for visitors to make music through body movement, as well as immersive elements, live performances, and workshops
Exhibition Dates:  June 7 –Sept 27, 2026
Location: The Met Fifth Avenue, Gallery 199


(New York, January, 2026)—From clapping hands and tapping feet to beatboxing and whistling, the human body is a musical instrument. In turn, instruments often draw their form and decoration from the body. Musical Bodies, which opens on June 7 at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, will explore the multifaceted relationship between musical instruments and the human body. This is the first major exhibition to address this theme and will bring together some 130 works from around the world and across time, including musical instruments, paintings, sculptures, and drawings from The Met collection along with important international loans.

 “Musical instruments, which represent an important part of the Met’s collection, have long been recognized and celebrated as dynamic tools for creative expression, and also as works of art in their own right,” said Max Hollein, The Met’s Marina Kellen French Director and CEO. “This multisensory exhibition is the first to explore—through remarkable instruments, objects, and works of art—the fascinating ways in which sound, musical objects and the human form have been in conversation for millennia. Including outstanding instruments, powerful performances and immersive in-gallery experiences, Musical Bodies is a show that will resonate, fascinate and inspire.”

Barbara Mandrell’s Mosrite Crutch Guitar

Patrons Support

The exhibition is made possible by Barbara Tober, the Diane W. and James E. Burke Fund, the William Randolph Hearst Foundation, and the Gail and Parker Gilbert Fund.

Additional support is provided by Anonymous, The Dancing Tides Foundation, and the Vanguard Council.

Encompassing 4,000 years of music history and art, Musical Bodies will feature a range of objects from across the visual arts, literature, religion, pop culture, and mythology. This includes ancient Egyptian rattles, paintings by Titian and Degas, instrument-inspired apparel, and one of Prince’s most notable guitars. The ways in which the boundaries between body and instrument have been artfully blurred will be explored through visionary works such as Nam June Paik’s TV Cello; the PianoArc circular keyboard designed in collaboration with Brockett Parsons, keyboardist for Lady Gaga; and a steel guitar in the form of a crutch that was made for country music singer and songwriter Barbara Mandrell while she was recovering from an automobile crash.



Musical Bodies will include prominent works from across 10 of The Met’s curatorial departments, including over 50 instruments from the Department of Musical Instruments as well as ancient works from Egypt, 19th-century masterpieces from European Paintings, and 20th -century works from the Department of Modern and Contemporary Art. The exhibition will also feature significant loans from collectors and institutions such as the Musée de la musique (Paris), the National Music Museum (Vermillion, South Dakota), and the Royal College of Music (London). One of the earliest surviving bowed string instruments, a rare figural lira da braccio from the Kunsthistorisches Museum (Vienna), and a lavish hurdy gurdy from the Victoria & Albert Museum (London) will be shown in the United States for the first time.

“Musical Bodies first formed in my mind as a deceptively simple question: Why are so many instruments shaped and decorated like the human body?” said Bradley Strauchen-Scherer, Curator in the Department of Musical Instruments at The Met.”The quest for an answer has become an exploration of humanity through the lens of instruments and music. We find ourselves represented in these instruments because, for much of our history, music has been central to who we are and what we do. I hope this exhibition will reconnect all of us with our innate musicality and shared heritage of harmony.”

Through six thematic sections, the exhibition will illuminate the relationship between the body and musical instruments and how they serve as channels for self-exploration and expressions of culture and belief systems. Musical Bodies will also reveal how instruments are used to stand in for the body to address topics that are traditionally considered taboo, such as sex and death.

Musical Bodies was conceived as an experiential exhibition. An innovative interactive will enable visitors to create music through intuitive movements and explore the blurred boundaries between body and instrument. Large-scale projections will display newly commissioned footage of beatboxing, body percussion, tap dancing, and more by such acclaimed New York–based and international artists as tap dancer Savion Glover, Beatbox House, and whistler Molly Lewis. Special activations throughout the run of the exhibition will take place in the gallery and include musical performances from an array of artists as well as workshops that activate the body as an instrument. More details will be announced at a later date.

Credits and Related Content

Musical Bodies is conceived and organized by Bradley Strauchen-Scherer, Curator in the Department of Musical Instruments at The Met, assisted by Ava Valentino, Research Assistant in the Department of Musical Instruments.

A fully illustrated catalogue will accompany the exhibition and will be available for purchase from The Met Store.

The catalogue is made possible by the Mary C. and James W. Fosburgh Publications Fund.

The Met will host a variety of exhibition-related educational and public programs, including a Creative Convening, Artists on Artworks and Met Expert talks in the galleries, a music workshop, and more. Details will be announced.

Musical Bodies will be on view during the presentation of the exhibition Costume Art (May 10, 2026–January 10, 2027), which will examine the centrality of the dressed body in fashion and art. The two shows will provide visitors with distinct and engaging explorations of the body’s relationship to artistic expression.

Featured image– Thomas Zach, Violino Harpa Forma Maxima, 1874. Wood (spruce, maple, ebony), metal strings. Collections Musée de la musique / Cliché Claude Germain, 2020. Cité de la musique-Philharmonie de Paris

For the Silo, Jarrod Barker.