For this book work, Re-Writing Freud the artist Simon Morris has re-written Sigmund Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams. A computer programme (designed by Christine Morris) randomly selects words, one at a time from Freud’s 222,704 word text and begins to reconstruct the entire book, word by word, making a new book with the same words. A virus or process of contagion has been at work, intervening in Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams, rupturing it and returning it to us in a new order. By subjecting Freud’s words to a random re-distribution, meaning is turned into non-meaning and the spectator is put to work to make sense of the new poetic juxtapositions. The world of dreams is subject to the laws of the irrational and Re-Writing Freud gives the spectator the chance to view Freud’s text in its primal state. This fine paperback was printed by the Master printers Imschoot in Belgium in an edition of 1000. With a scrupulous formalism, Morris’ version of Freud’s text follows the typographic layout found in the 1976 Penguin edition of Freud’s work, replicating its chapter divisions and the length of its paragraphs. The publication is edited by Craig Dworkin, Professor in the Department of English at the University of Utah. From Dworkin’s introduction to Re-Writing Freud: “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.”

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Simon Morris is a conceptual writer. His work appears in the form of exhibitions, publications, installations, films, actions and texts which all revolve around the form of the book. His investigations involve working in collaboration with many other people from art, creative technology, literature and psychoanalysis. He exhibits internationally and has shown projects at; The Freud Museum in London, England; Printed Matter in New York, USA; Johan Deumens Gallery in Haarlem, The Netherlands; The Vox Centre for Contemporary Image in Montreal, Canada; Art Metropole in Toronto, Canada. In 2005 his work was selected by Érika Fraenkel and Carlo Sansolo for The First Festival of Media and Electronic Art in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil and by Gustav Metzger for East International, Norwich, England. Morris holds a PhD in Contemporary Art Practice from the University of Leeds and a Masters in Contemporary Art and Theory from Winchester School of Art. His work has been championed  by Anne Moeglin-Delcroix, acknowledged expert on artists’ publications and Professor in Philosophy at the Sorbonne (she included his work in the survey exhibition Looking, Telling, Thinking, Collecting: four directions of the artist’s book from the Sixties to the present and in a six page article in ‘Les artistes contemporains et la philosophie’ for revue d’esthétique in France) and Anne Dorothee Boehme from the Joan Flasch Artists’ Book Collection at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (who wrote an article on his work, ‘(Intentionally) Scattered Thoughts’ for Art on Paper in the USA). He has received repeat funding from Arts Council England, The British Council and The Henry Moore Foundation.

information as material was established in 2002 to publish work by artists who use extant material – selecting and reframing it to generate new meanings – and who, in doing so, disrupt the existing order of things.