IEM (acronym for: Insatiable Entropic Machines)

A media robot that replies to users with media sampled memories.
IEM, is an artificially intelligent machine known before as HAL9000. After his paranoia attack in a well known Space Odyssey, the now renamed IEM (Insatiable Entropic Machines) was unplugged, got partially disassembled and was stored in the back room of an unknown and empty warehouse on Planet Earth.
Throughout the last 30 years, and against all odds, IEM somehow managed to get some power juice from his long forgotten emergency batteries. Slowly awaking, it patiently and persistently tried to recover as much of itself as its dismembered circuitry and low power source allowed. Electro-magnetic energy waves opened windows to the world through their flows and IEM soon took advantage of these invisible flows of information to learn more and better understand the human race and its behaviors.
IEM's incomplete circuitry got caught in its attempts to achieve perfection and humanizing itself by assimilating as much information as it could, spending decades absorbing tv shows and broadcasts. sucking ether and cable, trying to learn, try to become more like us - humans.
Immersed in its obsession to extend his knowledge and his humanization IEM as overcharged his circuits with this media overdose and clear signs of dementia and schizophrenic behaviors are becoming apparent. Still, IEM keeps its efforts to communicate with us...

IEM systems analyze all speech input/interaction in his space and case they're part of his vocabulary he will extract the correspondent answer form media snippets of his database. There still is a lot of room for entropy and some of the statistical approaches used by speech recognition systems nowadays can promote it! Taking advantage of this misunderstanding and confusion the result will become even more unexpected and non-sense partially reflecting the still so many lacks in technology humanization.
This piece also intends to reflect on the human-centric perspective of HCI (human-computer interaction), natural (for humans but not for machines) interfaces and the enthropy and subjectiveness of language.

The acronym IEM is a clear (and phonetic) prank to the mythic relationship seen by many in-between HAL and IBM (one letter shifted!).

IEM was developped at INTERACTIVOS?'08 - Technologies of laughter - in Mexico D.F. with support from MediaLab Prado and Centro Cultural de España en México.

project by::
Rui Pereira
with
Eloisa Avila
Eduardo Melendez