SYMMETRY, AGAIN (August 9, 2014)
As I was shaving this morning, I remembered my attempts to teach computers how to recognize beauty. This was at MIT in the early Seventies, when artificial intelligence was one of my interests. At the time, I worked closely with a psychologist from Harvard who was an authority on the psychology of art. I could not remember his name, though. As my experiments focused on symmetry, I remembered Deepak Chopra. Seeing my paintings in mid-Nineties, he immediately noted their symmetry. As soon as I finished my morning ablutions, I went to the desktop computer in my study and started searching for the psychologist’s name on my Residua website. It took me only a few seconds to find it. It was Rudolph Arnheim, of course. To my amazement, his name appears in an addendum to a piece about the Indian guru’s comment about my paintings (“Yes, Symmetry,” April 14, 1996). Their names are bound together in my brain. Not surprisingly, the key word I used in my search was “symmetry.”