An immersive sci-fi short by writer-director . “Loop” centres around a reclusive former tech CEO’s quest to teach AI how to experience and process true human emotions. However these ’emotion experiments’ involve a series of scripted scenarios that seem to do more to call basic humanity into question as the film blurs the lines between drama and sci-fi, human and machine, real and artificial.
Loop is an artistic exploration of a simple hypothesis: emotion cannot be programmed, it must be felt and experienced to be real. I started exploring this concept while observing my young son discover and display new emotions through his own direct experience and contact with others. He was learning to process the feelings of anger, joy, disappointment, sadness, and I found this progression of maturity fascinating and insightful. I started to question whether replicating an emotive incident could result in a similar reaction every time and, if so, could we program a machine to feel?