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A pair of HAL 9000 logo concepts by Harry Lange from the production of Stanley Kubrick's sci-fi classic 2001: A Space Odyssey. HAL's eerie betrayal of astronauts Bowman (Keir Dullea) and Poole (Gary Lockwood) unsettled audiences at the time and remains today, more than ever, an ominous reminder of the dangers of Artificial Intelligence.

Credited production designer Harry Lange created these concepts during the pre-production stage, and they later toured with the Kubrick Exhibition for ten years. Lange's other hardware designs appeared throughout the film.

The final HAL 9000 logo design was slightly different, with these earlier concepts offering a unique insight into how the logo evolved during pre-production. The logos are rendered with Letraset hand-applied across two separate pieces of black-painted paper with hand-painted corrections. The blue colouring used on the second concept resembles the logo of IBM, the global frontrunner of computing at the time, who provided the production with technical information. When Kubrick decided that HAL would turn on Bowman and Poole, his team wrote to IBM, informing them that they would not use IBM logos anywhere near HAL's red-eyed panels. Dimensions (blue logo): 16.5 cm x 7 cm (6.5" x 2.75"); (white logo): 15 cm x 7.25 cm (6" x 3")

Estimate: £2,000 - 4,000 M

View all lots from 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY (1968)