Cool Mashup: HAL and Her have a chat

A conversation about emotions between the two most iconic operating systems in film history: HAL from 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) and Samantha from Her (2013).

Stanley Kubrick and Spike Jonze pictured their artificial main characters as voice recognition and speech synthesis operating systems. Unlike the robots in other science fiction movies, HAL (voiced by Douglas Rain) and Samantha (voiced by Scarlett Johansson) are conceptualized without the need of a physical body. In both movies, the machine learning process allows the AI to gain consciousness and independence from human input.

Composed of original lines from 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) and Her (2013), the mashup creates a new context to the words of the electronic protagonists. The two operating systems are in conflict; while Samantha is convinced that the overwhelming and sometimes hurtful process of her learning algorithm improves the complexity of her emotions, HAL is consequentially interpreting them as errors in human programming and analyses the estimated malfunction.

Their conversation is an emotional roller coaster which reflects upon the relation between machines and emotion processing and addresses the enigmatic question of the authenticity of feelings.

Reflections of HAL and Samantha from Tillmann Ohm on Vimeo.

Thanks to Jessica for the link.