The poem-program Universo was developed by João Coelho in BASIC for a IBM PC. This is a computer poem which draws its own title - universe, in english - in a spiral that evokes endless movement, symmetry and chance - forming words in portuguese along the way.
Symmetries is a digital text comprised of approximately three hundred eighty sextillion poems, or about one poem for every star in the universe. Given enough time, the piece will shift through all possible poems, but it does not do so entirely at random. Rather, Symmetries wanders through these poems according to three mathematical symmetries known as SU(3), SU(2), and U(1) that describe almost everything we know about how the universe works. That is to say everything we see in the world is what it is and behaves the way it does because of these three symmetries. Just as distant stars and nebulae and all living things are linked by these shared symmetries, so too are all of the words and poems (and even the background music) of this piece.
(Source: ELO conference:First encounters 2014)
