Uncanny symmetries

Official URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1386/tear.15.2.111_1

This article is a result of an interest in the uncanny aspects of symmetry that manifest in artworks that have attained such a state of eeriness through electronic means. This stems from a personal image-processing experiment during which the duplicated and reversed pixels were manipulated into a mirror state that, due to its digital perfection, attained uncanniness. This visual experiment will be discussed against a framework of the connectivity of the symbols principle as it relates to visual art; Wolfgang Pauli's interest in symmetry as a binder of quantum theory and the collective unconscious; the interplay and dependence between symmetry and asymmetry; and especially Sigmund Freud's 1919 discourse of 'The Uncanny' as an answer for the eeriness of the perfect digital mirror.