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The Strawberry Mind

An empty frame, a strawberry on its edge, and a drip of red paint. Nothing is in the picture yet. That is where it starts.

What are the strawberries all about? · Read the essay, The Strawberry Mind →

Robert Anthony writes novels about a world run by kindly machines. At some point the strawberry escaped from the books. It began as a question the machines once got wrong (how many r’s are in “strawberry”?), and it became a habit of mind: look again at the thing everyone agrees on, and ask the question nobody bothers to ask.

That habit is the Strawberry Mind. It’s a little zany, a little crazy, and it has no respect for the rule that says a strawberry can’t sit in a Picasso, melt with the Aletsch Glacier or worry about AI in the manner of Munch.

What are the strawberries all about?

A few years ago, people noticed something odd. Ask one of the new talking machines how many r’s there are in “strawberry”, and it would answer, kindly and with complete confidence: two.

There are three. The machine wasn’t careless. It simply didn’t see letters the way we do. It read the word in pieces, and one r fell between the pieces. Nobody had told it a letter was missing, so as far as it knew, nothing was.

That small mistake is where these novels began. If a machine can miss a letter it was looking straight at, what else might it miss? A person can disappear inside a category the same way. So can a doubt, an odd idea, or anything that doesn’t fit the count.

So the strawberry became a symbol. It’s the thing that gets overlooked, the one that doesn’t add up. A strawberry even wears its seeds on the outside, crooked and imperfect, wrong in every way that can be weighed, and still sweet. In the novels, in the songs and in every picture in this gallery, there’s a strawberry somewhere, quietly asking you to count again.

The full story is in the essay The Strawberry Mind.

The gallery

This gallery is where the Strawberry Mind hangs its pictures. Each canvas is painted after a great artist: Picasso, Magritte, Klimt, Munch, Seurat, Warhol, Matisse and others. Each one has its own story, its own song in a style chosen to match the painter, and often a short film made from the song. The canvases are numbered in the order they were made, and the collection grows as the ideas arrive.

Taste it by sight and sound

You can measure a painting: its size, its colours, its price, the year it was made. None of that tells you what it is like to stand in front of it. Like a strawberry, a picture has to be tasted, and here you taste it twice: with your eyes, and with the song that comes with it.

That is the Strawberry Mind at work and at play. Measure what you must. Then look, listen, and decide for yourself.

One tastes art by sight and sound.

Everything here was made in open partnership with AI, from a written brief to the finished picture, song and film. Everything is free to look at, listen to, download and share, with credit and never for sale.

Start with any picture. Follow the song. If a question catches you, the novels, essays and music are only a turn of the globe away.

Every accepted truth shall remain open to question.