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Evil computer just wants to be friends

Maggie Koerth-Baker at 6:58 am Fri, Feb 24, 2012

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In the tradition of The Shining re-cut to look like an uplifting comedy, comes this music video, which repurposes scenes from several movies—most prominently 2001: A Space Odyssey—to tell the story of a misunderstood computer that accidentally hurts the ones it loves.

The song is "Limited" by Jascha. The video was created by my friend John Pavlus (who has also made some cool films about entropy and the Antikythera Mechanism). He says:

It seemed like a fun challenge to take images that have acquired so much "baggage" over the years — like the glowering cyclops eye of HAL from 2001, which has become visual shorthand for "evil machine" — and try to attach completely opposite emotional associations to them. What if something like HAL wasn't evil at all, but just misunderstood in its intentions, like a puppy who plays too rough with its owner? That's exactly the image that Jascha's plaintive refrain in "Limited" put into my head. Remixing material from five very different films creates a necessarily impressionistic approach to telling a story, so maybe the story this video tells in your head isn't the same one that it tells in mine. Either way I hope it's a good one.

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Maggie Koerth-Baker is the science editor at BoingBoing.net. She writes a monthly column for The New York Times Magazine and is the author of Before the Lights Go Out, a book about electricity, infrastructure, and the future of energy. You can find Maggie on Twitter and Facebook.

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MORE:  accidents • computers • intelligence • movies • music • remix • science fiction

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  • http://twitter.com/AbelUndercity Abel Undercity

    Friend Computer would like me to point out that this is obviously the corrected version of events, and it makes Friend Computer happy.  We all want our Friend, The Computer, to be happy, don’t we, citizens?

    Have a nice daycycle!

    • Bonobo

      Remember Citizen, information about Friend Computer is Clearance Ultraviolet. Any knowledge of this information is treason. Please report for termination.
      Good daycycle fellow citizens.

  • http://hame.ca/one/ Hamish Grant

    Electric Dreams and Demon Seed are two of my favourite evil/rebel computer films.  

  • millie fink

    Is that all fair use?

  • chellberty

    still prefer to just reboot after failure. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u48uTQTp9Qc

  • expat

    loosely related: what if Michael Bay directed 2001 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t3iQk2PzIKc&feature=youtu.be

    • Bonobo

      That is impressively well done!

  • Slant

    This video is seriously lacking due to the fact that Nostromo’s Mother is missing.  Granted, it did blow up, but still…

  • http://egypt.urnash.com Egypt Urnash

    this made me cry :(“

  • mesocosm

    The lyrics remind me of Commander Data’s “Ode to Spot” from ST:TNG. 
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SySZdvsFYt4

  • Scott R

    Much less clever than The Shining recut; the creator used scenes from Robocop, Wargames, Tron, Moon for this one. Yet this one didn’t work as well despite having chosen scenes from four movies to that one.

  • Eark_the_Bunny

    HAL the computer was never “evil”.   It was used improperly and it malfunctioned.  See the movie or the book – 2010:  The Year We Made Contact.  End of line…

  • Matti Laakso

    reminds me of this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L9e5YgERtJk