Re-Writing Freud

Simon Morris, artist, and Christine Morris, creative technologist, Re-Writing Freud, 2005;  iPhone / iPad app edition, 2011.

The iPad app edition of Re-Writing Freud is currently on view at the Beinecke Library (ground floor, North side) in Psyche & Muse: Creative Entanglements with the Science of the Soul. Using your finger, you randomly re-write Sigmund Freud’s famous book, The Interpretation of Dreams, allowing you to see his text in a dreamlike state.

In Re-Writing Freud, British artist Simon Morris collaborated with creative technologist Christine Morris to re-write The Interpretation of Dreams by feeding the text into a computer program designed to randomly select and re-order the words, thus recreating the book. The artists have remade this work as an iPhone/iPad application allowing an interactive reprocessing of Freud’s 223,704-word text. This project, and two related book projects featured in Dr. Froyd: Psychoanalysis in the Popular Imagination located on the Library Mezzanine, use Sigmund Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams to explore the ability of art and text to “disrupt the existing order of things.” For more information about this project, visit Christine Morris's description of the project: Re-Writing Freud.