For children growing up during the great age of Japanese tin toys, a robot could seem like a visitor from the future.
Bright colors, mechanical movement, flashing lights, gears, and exaggerated features transformed a simple toy into something that represented an entire childhood imagination. These robots didn’t need sophisticated technology by today’s standards. They only needed to move across the floor and capture a child’s attention.
American Material Memory preserves that sense of wonder. The robot becomes a reminder of a time when the future was imagined in colorful metal, batteries, gears, and childhood imagination.
From the Artist:
This was my second, actual Horikawa Robot. Although I wasn’t a kid when I got it, I was a kid at heart, partly because I only paid $75. If you could find a mint version with the box today, you’d spend 10x what it cost me.
I sold it a few years later, along with my other robots, on eBay after we’d moved to the Bay Area during the dot-com bubble. Sometimes you gotta sell the things you love to pay the bills for the ones you love — that’s called life. I think I got $125 — which was amazing to me at that time.
I still love toys and memories like these; it’s just now that they’re 6 feet tall. =-)
For children growing up during the great age of Japanese tin toys, a robot could seem like a visitor from the future.
Bright colors, mechanical movement, flashing lights, gears, and exaggerated features transformed a simple toy into something that represented an entire childhood imagination. These robots didn’t need sophisticated technology by today’s standards. They only needed to move across the floor and capture a child’s attention.
American Material Memory preserves that sense of wonder. The robot becomes a reminder of a time when the future was imagined in colorful metal, batteries, gears, and childhood imagination.
From the Artist:
This was my second, actual Horikawa Robot. Although I wasn’t a kid when I got it, I was a kid at heart, partly because I only paid $75. If you could find a mint version with the box today, you’d spend 10x what it cost me.
I sold it a few years later, along with my other robots, on eBay after we’d moved to the Bay Area during the dot-com bubble. Sometimes you gotta sell the things you love to pay the bills for the ones you love — that’s called life. I think I got $125 — which was amazing to me at that time.
I still love toys and memories like these; it’s just now that they’re 6 feet tall. =-)
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