Robot of the Week (5)
I second Kyle’s nomination of the HAL-9000 for the Robot of the Week.
Image of Hal, from Kubrick’s 2001: a Space Odyssey (1968)
What I find most interesting about Hal is his physicality, or lack thereof. Hal seems to lack a body, save for his sole red eye, which, like a camera’s lens, constantly–and at times anxiously–monitors the ship’s crew. Yet the status of Hal’s body is problematic in the film. Is he truly bodiless–or does he have the most amazing body of all–the steel hull of a space craft, complete with all of its systems of functioning and human resources?
If you find the HAL-9000 interesting, you might enjoy a couple of other similarly bent films: Jean-Luc Godard’s Alphaville, une étrange aventure de Lemmy Caution (1965) and Donald Cammell’s Demon Seed (1977). Both films feature distributed artificial intelligences, (the Alpha 60 and Proteus IV, respectively) who, like Hal, lack bodies but whose cognition is distributed across a wide variety of physical systems.
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You’re currently reading “Robot of the Week (5),” an entry on C-LIT 146: Class Forum
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- September 5, 2006 / 5:18 pm
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