Rewriting Freud is now available as an iOS Universal app

Artwork by Simon Morris; programmed by Christine Morris

Available to buy on the iTunes App Store.

This app is the next incarnation of the conceptual artwork, Re-Writing Freud by Simon Morris, bringing current technology and Freud together. The app will be available on both iPad and iPhone and will be priced the same as the book at £8.99 and will be available via the app store.

Use your finger to randomly re-write Freud’s text. By subjecting Freud’s words to a random re-distribution, meaning will be turned into non-meaning and you will have to make sense of the new poetic juxtapositions.

For the bookwork, Re-Writing Freud, published by iam in 2005, the artist Simon Morris re-wrote Sigmund Freud’s ‘The Interpretation of Dreams’. For that project, Christine Morris designed a computer programme that randomly selected words, one at a time, from Freud’s 222,704 word text and began to reconstruct the entire book, word by word, making a new book with the same words, every time the programme was re-started. The resulting book was one instantiation of that process, scrupulously typeset according to the dimensions, fonts, chapter divisions and paragraph lengths of the 1976 Penguin paperback edition of Freud’s work, and printed on equivalent paper stocks.

Morris unleashed a virus. He put a contagious process to work, intervening in Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams, rupturing it and returning it to us in a new order. The world of dreams is subject to the laws of the irrational and Re-Writing Freud gave the spectator the chance to view Freud’s text in its primal state. The fine production was printed by Imschoot, Ghent, in an edition of 1000, and given their blue stamp of approval. With a conceptualist formalism, Morris’ version of Freud’s text follows the typographic layout found in the edition of Freud’s work owned by his long-term collaborator, the psychoanalyst Dr. Howard Britton, whose worn book cover and ‘Big Daddy’ sticker from a Sugar Puffs cereal packet sets the tone for Morris’ appropriation.

With Re-Writing Freud, judgments about sense no longer themselves make any sense. The reader who responds to this book by complaining that it is nonsensical is neither right nor wrong, but asking the wrong question, posing an impossible problem in response this book’s insistent imaginary solution.”

– Professor Craig Dworkin, University of Utah, from the Introduction to Re-Writing Freud, ‘Grammar Degree Zero’.