Hear a “DNA-Based Prediction of Nietzsche’s Voice:” First Attempt at Simulating Voice of a Dead Person

in Philosophy | March 23rd, 2015

Whether they sub­mit to his mighty philo­soph­i­cal influ­ence, resist it with all their own might, or fall some­where in between, every­one who’s read the pro­nounce­ments of Friedrich Niet­zsche (find his ebooks here) rec­og­nizes his voice — well, his tex­tu­al voice, that is. Hav­ing died in 1900 after spend­ing the last decade of his life in a men­tal break­down, the author of Thus Spake Zarathus­tra and Beyond Good and Evil has an excuse for not leav­ing behind much in the way of audio mate­r­i­al. But love Niet­zsche or hate him, a read­er has to won­der: what did the guy actu­al­ly sound like?

Here to sati­ate our curios­i­ty come Flavia Mon­tag­gio, Patri­cia Mon­tag­gio, and Imp Kerr, authors of the Inves­tiga­tive Genet­ics paper “DNA-based pre­dic­tion of Niet­zsche’s voice,” which sup­pos­ed­ly offers a sci­en­tif­ic means of doing just that. “We col­lect­ed trace amounts of cel­lu­lar mate­r­i­al (Touch DNA) from books that belonged to the philoso­pher Friedrich Niet­zsche,” reads the abstract, which goes on to describe the gath­er­ing of Niet­zsche-relat­ed data even­tu­al­ly “con­vert­ed into bio-mea­sures that were used to 3D-print a vocal tract and lar­ynx through which phona­tion was organ­i­cal­ly gen­er­at­ed.” The result, after run­ning every­thing through a series of text-to-speech sim­u­la­tions: “the first attempt at sim­u­lat­ing the voice of a deceased per­son”:

It all seems legit, right? Or maybe you Ger­man-speak­ers out there will sus­pect some­thing fishy, start­ing with the unlike­ly name of Imp Kerr. It actu­al­ly belongs to “a Swedish-French artist liv­ing in New York City, most­ly known for her fake Amer­i­can Appar­el adver­tise­ment cam­paign,” or so reads the Wikipedia page quot­ed by a Lan­guage Log post on the project. “I have no idea whether any­thing in the Wikipedia arti­cle about Imp Kerr is true,” writes author Mark Liber­man, “but it’s clear from inter­nal evi­dence that the alleged Inves­tiga­tive Genet­ics arti­cle is a piece of per­for­mance art.”

Liber­man breaks down the paper’s humor­ous ele­ments, from its “many seg­ments that dis­play qua­si-sci­en­tif­ic ter­mi­nol­o­gy in mean­ing­less or con­tra­dic­to­ry ways” to its sim­ple inabil­i­ty to “restrain a cer­tain tell­tale play­ful­ness” (as when it deals with a res­o­nance “low­er than expect­ed in regards of Nietzsche’s robust mandibles”). All this may remind you of the famous hoax where­in physi­cist Alan Sokal pub­lished a paper­ful of sheer non­sense in a respect­ed cul­tur­al-stud­ies jour­nal. Or you may think of the film above, which pur­ports, ques­tion­ably, to show Niet­zsche’s last days. It just goes to show that, if your ideas live on, you live on — or your read­ers will try to make you do so.

via The New Inquiry/Leit­er Reports

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Dig­i­tal Niet­zsche: Down­load Nietzsche’s Major Works as Free eBooks

Down­load Wal­ter Kaufmann’s Lec­tures on Niet­zsche, Kierkegaard, Sartre & Mod­ern Thought (1960)

Human, All Too Human: 3‑Part Doc­u­men­tary Pro­files Niet­zsche, Hei­deg­ger & Sartre

Free Online Phi­los­o­phy Cours­es

Col­in Mar­shall hosts and pro­duces Note­book on Cities and Cul­ture as well as the video series The City in Cin­e­ma and writes essays on cities, lan­guage, Asia, and men’s style. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

What Happens When a Cheap Ikea Print Gets Presented as Fine Art in a Museum

in Art, Comedy, Design, Life | March 23rd, 2015

The enti­ty to whom Dutch group, Life­hunters, attrib­ut­es the muse­um qual­i­ty art­work in the video prank above doesn’t exist. The “famous” Swedish artist’s han­dle –IKE Andrews –is but a puck­ish ref­er­ence to IKEA, the pur­vey­or of the 10€ print (oh snap, it’s not even an orig­i­nal!) var­i­ous unnamed “art experts” are asked to eval­u­ate, hav­ing been led to believe it’s some­thing rare and won­der­ful. IKE Andrews’ fel­low fic­tion­al enti­ty, Borat, would be grat­i­fied by how read­i­ly these experts accept pre­sen­ter Boris Lange’s sug­ges­tions as to the val­ue of this work.

So how bad is this “paint­ing”? Wal­ter Keane bad? Mar­garet Keane bad? Is it a Velvis? A sad clown? The sort of crum­my land­scape artist Wayne White might snap up in a thrift store?

Only if you think IKEA achieved glob­al dom­i­nance by choos­ing designs, pat­terns, and images in order for snot­ty hip­sters to buy them iron­i­cal­ly…

As sev­er­al YouTube, Twit­ter, and blog com­menters have men­tioned, the print itself is pret­ty cool.

It’s a media fren­zy, but inter­est­ing­ly, the artist is not com­ing for­ward to her­ald his or her role in the hoax.

Make that artists. Turns out IKE Andrews is a pair of Swiss street artists, Chris­t­ian Rebec­chi and Pablo Tog­ni, who col­lab­o­rate as NEVERCREW.

They have a fas­ci­na­tion with cross sec­tions. As their web­site some­what murk­i­ly explains [all sic]:

These mod­els, as such, from time to time actu­al­ly con­tain more or less exten­sive real­i­ties, rep­re­sent­ed as autonomous sys­tems of which the real­i­ty of the view­er becomes a part. This then the rap­port becomes the very sub­ject, main­ly high­light­ed as the rela­tion­ship between man and nature (between human being and its nature), but auto­mat­i­cal­ly extend­ed to a vision of total and inevitable rela­tion­ship between every­thing, between every part, where it is only the point of view, the posi­tion with­in a sys­tem, to define a selec­tion.

IKEA stream­lines the artists’ phi­los­o­phy for the mass­es thus­ly:

We call the theme “liv­ing struc­tures” and we like to see them as mod­els of liv­ing sys­tems. We would like our art to gen­er­ate inter­est and curios­i­ty, and the view­er to become a part of the mech­a­nism with his or her thoughts, per­spec­tive and emo­tions.

Philosophy’s all well and good, but what’s it actu­al­ly look like, this “Mes­sage in a Bot­tle”?

Well, it seems to me to be a bot­tle, implau­si­bly halved length­wise to reveal a bunch of steam­punk stuff bal­anced atop robot spi­der legs, form­ing a cage around an ancient-look­ing whale. Also, a cloud rain­ing yel­low liq­uid, or pos­si­bly light. (Hope­ful­ly the lat­ter). Oh! And it appears to have been paint­ed on a brown paper bag.

I can think of plen­ty of peo­ple who’d not only like it, but find mean­ing in it, as the experts do. The only dif­fer­ence is the experts do so on cam­era, a fact not all of them are will­ing to laugh at, when host Lange informs them they’ve been punked.

The artists aren’t the only ones play­ing it cool. The inter­net may be explod­ing, but so far, nei­ther IKEA, nor the Nether­lands’ Arn­hem Muse­um, where the prank was staged, have made men­tion of this busi­ness.

via Hyper­al­ler­gic

Relat­ed Con­tent:

F for Fake: Orson Welles’ Short Film & Trail­er That Was Nev­er Released in Amer­i­ca

The Great Dr. Fox Lec­ture: A Vin­tage Aca­d­e­m­ic Hoax (1970)

How the “Paul McCart­ney is Dead” Hoax Start­ed at an Amer­i­can Col­lege News­pa­per and Went Viral (1969)

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, and moth­er of a teen film­mak­er whose best known work was shot guer­ril­la style in a Red Hook, Brook­lyn Ikea. Fol­low her @AyunHalliday

The Touching Story Behind Paraguay’s Landfill Orchestra: Now Told in Film, and Soon a Book

in Film, Life, Music | March 23rd, 2015

Back in 2012, I first told you about the amaz­ing youth cham­ber orches­tra from Cateu­ra, Paraguay. The fam­i­lies from this small impov­er­ished town, locat­ed along­side a vast land­fill, can’t afford many lux­u­ries — like buy­ing instru­ments for their kids. But what they lack in mon­ey, they make up for in inge­nu­ity and good spir­it. The short doc­u­men­tary above gives you a glimpse of their touch­ing sto­ry, show­ing how cre­ative lead­ers in the com­mu­ni­ty fash­ioned instru­ments with their own hands, turn­ing oil cans into cel­los, and alu­minum bowls into vio­lins. Watch them in action:

But why stop with the short sto­ry, when you can get the longer sto­ry. Last week, a full blown film called Land­fill Har­mon­ic pre­miered at the SXSW Film Fes­ti­val 2015. And now the film (see a short trail­er here) will be screened at select­ed film fes­ti­vals while the pro­duc­ers try to find a dis­trib­u­tor who can bring the pro­duc­tion to a wider audi­ence. And, in anoth­er piece of good news, Simon & Schus­ter announced that it plans to pub­lish a pic­ture book about the Recy­cled Orches­tra. Look for Ada’s Vio­lin: The Sto­ry of the Recy­cled Orches­tra of Paraguay in March 2016.

You can watch Land­fill Har­mon­ic at the fes­ti­vals men­tioned below. To keep tabs on future show­ings, fol­low this Face­book page.

• New York Children’s Film Fes­ti­val March 21, 2015
• Envi­ron­men­tal Film Fes­ti­val DC March 25, 2015
• TIFF Kid’s Film Fes­ti­val April 10 – 17, 2015

Google Puts Online 10,000 Works of Street Art from Across the Globe

in Art, Google, Museums, Travel | March 22nd, 2015

Cir­cling Birdies by Cheko, Grana­da Spain

Since last we wrote, Google Street Art has dou­bled its online archive by adding some 5,000 images, bring­ing the tal­ly to 10,000, with coor­di­nates pin­point­ing exact loca­tions on all five con­ti­nents (though as of this writ­ing, things are a bit thin on the ground in Africa). Giv­en the tem­po­ral real­i­ties of out­door, guer­ril­la art, pil­grims may arrive to find a blank can­vas where graf­fi­ti once flour­ished. (RIP New York City’s 5 Pointz, the “Insti­tute of High­er Burn­ing.”)

A major aim of the project is vir­tu­al preser­va­tion. As with per­for­mance art, doc­u­men­ta­tion is key. Not all of the work can be attrib­uted, but click on an image to see what is known. Guid­ed tours to neigh­bor­hoods rich with street art allow arm­chair trav­el­ers to expe­ri­ence the work, and inter­views with the artists dis­pel any num­ber of stereo­types.

Cul­tur­al insti­tu­tions like Turkey’s Pera Muse­um and Hong Kong’s Art Research Insti­tute, and street art projects based in such hubs as Rome, Paris, Syd­ney, and Bangkok, have pulled togeth­er offi­cial col­lec­tions of pho­tos and videos, but you can play cura­tor too.

It’s easy to add images to a col­lec­tion of your own mak­ing that can be shared with the pub­lic at large or saved for pri­vate inspi­ra­tion. Care­ful, you could lose hours…it’s like Pin­ter­est for peo­ple who grav­i­tate toward spray paint and rub­bish strewn vacant lots over ging­ham wrapped Mason jars.

It’s been a long and bru­tal win­ter here on the east coast, so for my first for­ay, I prowled for Signs of Spring. One of my first hits was “Cir­cling Birdies” by Cheko, above. Locat­ed in Grana­da, Spain, it’s one of the exist­ing works Google has turned into a GIF with some light, log­i­cal ani­ma­tion.

Behold a bit of what typ­ing “flower,” “baby ani­mals,” “plants,” and “trees” into a search box can yield! You can enter Google Street Art here.

Artist: Wal­ter Ker­shaw
Lon­don UK

Artists: Thrash­bird and Renee Gagnon
Los Ange­les, Cal­i­for­nia.

Artist: unknown
Rochester, NY

Icy and Sot
Rochester NY

Artist: Kristy San­doval
Los Ange­les, CA

Artists: Regg and Violant
Alfragide Por­tu­gal

Artist: Klit
Alfragide, Por­tu­gal
A giant col­or­ful bee­tle tries to fly between the ceil­ing and the floor of this park­ing lot. His wings seem filled with flower petals. So, the “Liv­ing Nature” project brought a set of huge insects that car­ry a note of liv­ing spir­it to the space.

Artist: Rai Cruz
Mani­la, Philip­pines

Artist: Chris­ti­aan Nagel
Lon­don, Eng­land

Artist: Lady Aiko
Rome, Italy

Artist: Andrew Ken­tish
Nepal

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Tour the World’s Street Art with Google Street Art

Obey the Giant: Short Film Presents the True Sto­ry of Shep­ard Fairey’s First Act of Street Art

Big Bang Big Boom: Graf­fi­ti Stop-Motion Ani­ma­tion Cre­ative­ly Depicts the Evo­lu­tion of Life

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine. Fol­low her @AyunHalliday

Watch the “Youngest String Quartet Ever” Perform Vivaldi, Michael Jackson & Katy Perry

in K-12, Music | March 21st, 2015

They’re billed as “the youngest string quar­tet ever.” The kids began play­ing in The Joy­ous String Quar­tet when they were four years old. Now, fast for­ward four more years, and they find them­selves per­form­ing 20 con­certs a year around the globe — in places like South Korea and Chi­na, and on the Ellen DeGeneres Show. Above you can watch them per­form Sum­mer “Presto” by Vival­di. Below, they give you a clas­si­cal ver­sion of Katy Per­ry’s “Fire­work:

And final­ly Michael Jack­son’s “Smooth Crim­i­nal.” In case you’re won­der­ing, the stu­dents come out of The Joy­ous Music School in Hicksville, NY.

via The Kids Should See This

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Four­teen-Year-Old Girl’s Blis­ter­ing Heavy Met­al Per­for­mance of Vival­di

Ele­men­tary School Kids Sing David Bowie’s “Space Odd­i­ty” & Oth­er Rock Hits: A Cult Clas­sic Record­ed in 1976

Ele­men­tary School Stu­dents Per­form in a Play Inspired by David Lynch’s Twin Peaks

Fol­low us on Face­book, Twit­ter, Google Plus and LinkedIn and  share intel­li­gent media with your friends. Or bet­ter yet, sign up for our dai­ly email and get a dai­ly dose of Open Cul­ture in your inbox.

Watch Rock Pioneer Sister Rosetta Tharpe Wow Audiences With Her Gospel Guitar

in Music | March 20th, 2015

The “British Inva­sion” as a his­tor­i­cal phe­nom­e­non, has achieved a sta­tus almost like that of Paul Revere’s ride, a water­shed moment con­densed to a sin­gu­lar image: The Stones, or—if you’re more inclined, The Beatles—step onto the tar­mac, young girls scream, cam­eras flash, micro­phones jos­tle… suits abound. We remem­ber the scenery, and the hair­cuts, but the his­to­ry dis­ap­pears. The all impor­tant con­text when the British land­ed in the mid six­ties has to do with anoth­er inva­sion at the same time on England’s shores, of black Amer­i­can blues artists who toured the UK and per­formed on British TV, begin­ning in 1963: Howl­in’ Wolf, Big Joe Williams, Mud­dy Waters, Light­nin’ Hop­kins… and Sis­ter Roset­ta Tharpe.

If Kei­th Richards has cred­it­ed Chuck Berry for his chops, say­ing he “lis­tened to every lick he played and picked it up,” he could per­haps say some­thing sim­i­lar about Sis­ter Tharpe, as could dozens of oth­er gui­tarists who watched her strut across the stage, pick­ing out hot, coun­tri­fied blues licks on her Gib­son SG. “Nobody—not Chuck Berry, not Scot­ty Moore, not James Bur­ton, not Kei­th Richards—played wilder or more pri­mal rock ‘n’ roll gui­tar than this woman who gave her life to God and would have cel­e­brat­ed her 100th birth­day on 20 March,” writes The Guardian.

And yet, per­haps because of her reli­gios­i­ty, or her race, or her gen­der, Sis­ter Tharpe has long remained unsung as a hero of both ear­ly rock ‘n’ roll and coun­try.

A pio­neer­ing crossover artist from the gospel world, Tharpe came from Cot­ton Plant, Arkansas, a town on the banks of the Mis­sis­sip­pi. Born to musi­cal par­ents, she toured the coun­try with her moth­er in revival per­for­mances across the south and made her first record at the age of 23. By the time she took the Man­ches­ter stage to sing “Didn’t it Rain” in the video at the top of the post, Tharpe was 49 years old and a high­ly sea­soned, con­fi­dent per­former who could cap­ti­vate any audi­ence with her pow­er­ful voice and phe­nom­e­nal play­ing. Just above, see a younger Tharpe play some jazz-inflect­ed blues in “That’s All,” a sexy-sound­ing song about tol­er­ance for sin­ful men. Sis­ter Tharpe worked clean, but she could get down with the best of ‘em.

Like most rock pio­neers, Roset­ta didn’t have an easy road to star­dom, and like many women in the music busi­ness, her sto­ry involves a fair amount of exploita­tion and abuse. But Tharpe rose above it, moved to the big city, and pitched her south­ern gospel tent in the heart of elec­tric blues ter­ri­to­ry. Learn about Roset­ta Tharpe’s life and career in the 2014 doc­u­men­tary above, The God­moth­er of Rock & Roll. It’s a title Tharpe well deserves, as well as some long over­due recog­ni­tion from the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

New Web Project Immor­tal­izes the Over­looked Women Who Helped Cre­ate Rock and Roll in the 1950s

Mud­dy Waters, Howl­in’ Wolf, Sis­ter Roset­ta Tharpe & Oth­er Amer­i­can Blues Leg­ends Per­form in the UK (1963–66)

Hail! Hail! Chuck Berry, the Father of Rock & Roll, Is 85

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

Rome Reborn: Take a Virtual Tour of Ancient Rome, Circa 320 C.E.

in History | March 20th, 2015

A few years ago, we fea­tured Rome Reborn, which is essen­tial­ly “a 3D dig­i­tal mod­el of the Eter­nal City at a time when Ancient Rome’s pop­u­la­tion had reached its peak (about one mil­lion) and the first Chris­t­ian church­es were being built.” Rome Reborn offers, declared Matthias Rasch­er, “a tru­ly stun­ning bird’s‑eye view of ancient Rome that makes you feel as if you were actu­al­ly there.” You may also remem­ber our posts on video analy­ses of great works of art by Khan Acad­e­my’s Smarthis­to­ry. Today, the two come togeth­er in the video above, “A Tour Through Ancient Rome in 320 C.E.”

In it, we not only see and move through ancient Rome recon­struct­ed, we have our extend­ed tour guid­ed by renowned “vir­tu­al archae­ol­o­gist” and over­seer of the Rome Reborn project Dr. Bernard Frisch­er, pro­fes­sor emer­i­tus at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Vir­ginia. He picks 320 C.E. as the year of the tour, “the peak of Rome’s devel­op­ment, cer­tain­ly in terms of pub­lic archi­tec­ture, for the sim­ple rea­son that the Emper­or at this time was Con­stan­tine the Great.” Short­ly after this year, Con­stan­tine would move the cap­i­tal from Rome to his city, Con­stan­tino­ple.

We hear Frisch­er in dia­logue with Dr. Steven Zuck­er, whose voice you may rec­og­nize from pre­vi­ous Smarthis­to­ry videos. Zuck­er’s ques­tions ensure that, while we take in the spec­ta­cle of Rome’s impres­sive archi­tec­ture (to say noth­ing of its equal­ly impres­sive aque­ducts) as it looked back in 320, we also think about what the real flesh-and-blood peo­ple who once lived there actu­al­ly did there: the jobs they did, the char­i­ot races they watched. “When I was study­ing ancient Rome,” admits Zuck­er, “one of the most dif­fi­cult things for me to under­stand was how all these ancient ruins fit togeth­er.” Now, with Frischer’s exper­tise, he and we can final­ly under­stand how the Forum, the Basil­i­ca, the Col­i­se­um, the Pan­theon and more all fit onto this ear­ly but still majes­tic urban fab­ric.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Free Cours­es in Ancient His­to­ry, Lit­er­a­ture & Phi­los­o­phy

Rome Reborn – An Amaz­ing Dig­i­tal Mod­el of Ancient Rome

How the Egypt­ian Pyra­mids Were Built: A New The­o­ry in 3D Ani­ma­tion

Vis­it Pom­peii (also Stone­henge & Ver­sailles) with Google Street View

Ani­ma­tion Gives You a Glimpse of What Life Was Like for Teenagers in Ancient Rome

The His­to­ry of Rome in 179 Pod­casts

Dis­cov­er 100 Great Works of Art with Videos Cre­at­ed by Khan Acad­e­my & Google Art Project

Col­in Mar­shall hosts and pro­duces Note­book on Cities and Cul­ture as well as the video series The City in Cin­e­ma and writes essays on cities, lan­guage, Asia, and men’s style. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

A Mesmerizing Supercut of the First and Final Frames of 55 Movies, Played Side by Side

in Film | March 19th, 2015

On his Vimeo page, Jacob T. Swin­ney frames his pret­ty remark­able super­cut with these words:

What can we learn by exam­in­ing only the first and final shot of a film? This video plays the open­ing and clos­ing shots of 55 films side-by-side. Some of the open­ing shots are strik­ing­ly sim­i­lar to the final shots, while oth­ers are vast­ly different–both serv­ing a pur­pose in com­mu­ni­cat­ing var­i­ous themes. Some show progress, some show decline, and some are sim­ply impact­ful images used to begin and end a film.

Below the jump, you can find a com­plete list of the films used in the super­cut, some released long ago (Dr. Strangelove), some more recent­ly (Bird­man). It was while watch­ing Gone Girl in the cin­e­ma that Swin­ney first came up with the idea for the clip. He start­ed “by choos­ing movies that pos­sessed either very sim­i­lar or very con­trast­ing opening/closing shots.” Then, he adds, “I decid­ed to expand a bit to include films that show a sto­ry of sorts with just the first and final shots. Basi­cal­ly, if an open­ing and clos­ing shot stuck with me, I includ­ed it.” You can find more videos by Swin­ney over on Vimeo.

(more…)

Robert Reich Debunks Three Economic Myths by Drawing Cartoons

in Art, Economics | March 19th, 2015

Robert Reich met Bill Clin­ton when they were both Rhodes Schol­ars dur­ing the 1960s. In the 70s, Reich attend­ed Yale Law School with Hill and Bill. And then, decades lat­er, he served in the Clin­ton admin­is­tra­tion as Sec­re­tary of Labor. Some­where along the line, the polit­i­cal econ­o­mist picked up some draw­ing skills (putting him in good com­pa­ny with Win­ston Churchill and George Bush) that work nice­ly in our age of white­board ani­mat­ed videos. Now a pro­fes­sor at UC Berke­ley, Reich visu­al­ly debunks three eco­nom­ic mytholo­gies in two min­utes. This clip fol­lows a rapid­fire 2012 video, again fea­tur­ing his car­toon­ing skills, called The Truth About the Econ­o­my.

ht @sheerly

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Free Online Eco­nom­ics Cours­es

The His­to­ry of Eco­nom­ics & Eco­nom­ic The­o­ry Explained with Comics, Start­ing with Adam Smith

60-Sec­ond Adven­tures in Eco­nom­ics: An Ani­mat­ed Intro to The Invis­i­ble Hand and Oth­er Eco­nom­ic Ideas

Read­ing Marx’s Cap­i­tal with David Har­vey (Free Course)

Sigmund Freud’s Psychoanalytic Drawings Show How He First Visualized the Ego, Superego, Id & More

in History, Psychology, Science | March 19th, 2015

It’s easy to think we know all there is to know about Sig­mund Freud. His name, after all, has become an adjec­tive, a sure sign that someone’s lega­cy has embed­ded itself in the cul­tur­al con­scious­ness. But did you know that the Ger­man neu­rol­o­gist we cred­it with the inven­tion of psy­cho­analy­sis, the diag­noses of hys­te­ria, dream inter­pre­ta­tion, and the death dri­ve began his career patient­ly dis­sect­ing eels in search of… eel tes­ti­cles? Per­haps you did know that. Per­haps you only sus­pect­ed it. There are few things about Freud—who also pio­neered both the med­ical and recre­ation­al use of cocaine, joined the august British Roy­al Soci­ety, and unwit­ting­ly re-engi­neered phi­los­o­phy and lit­er­ary criticism—that sur­prise me any­more. Freud was a pecu­liar­ly tal­ent­ed indi­vid­ual.

One area in which he excelled may seem mod­est next to his ros­ter of pub­li­ca­tions and celebri­ty acquain­tances, and yet, the doctor’s skill as a med­ical draughts­man and mak­er of dia­grams to illus­trate his the­o­ries sure­ly deserves some appre­ci­a­tion. Freud’s draw­ing received a book length treat­ment in 2006’s From Neu­rol­o­gy to Psy­cho­analy­sis: Sig­mund Freud’s Neu­ro­log­i­cal Draw­ings and Dia­grams of the Mind by Lynn Gamwell and Mark Solms. These are but a small sam­pling of the many works of med­ical art found with­in its cov­ers, tak­en from a 2006 exhib­it at the New York Acad­e­my of Med­i­cine of the largest col­lec­tion of Freud’s draw­ings ever assem­bled, in com­mem­o­ra­tion of his 150th birth­day.

As the title of the book indi­cates, the draw­ings lit­er­al­ly illus­trate the rad­i­cal shift Freud made from the hard sci­ence of neu­rol­o­gy to a prac­tice of his own inven­tion. Cura­tor Gamwell writes, “as Freud focused on increas­ing­ly com­plex men­tal func­tions such as dis­or­ders of lan­guage and mem­o­ry, he put aside any attempt to dia­gram the under­ly­ing phys­i­o­log­i­cal struc­ture, such as neu­ro­log­i­cal path­ways, and he began mak­ing schemat­ic images of hypo­thet­i­cal psy­cho­log­i­cal struc­tures,” i.e. the Ego, Super­ego, and Id, as rep­re­sent­ed at the top in a 1933 dia­gram. Below it, from 1921, see “Group Psy­chol­o­gy and the Analy­sis of the Ego,” a schemat­ic that “attempts to rep­re­sent rela­tions between the major men­tal sys­tems (or agen­cies) in a group of human minds.” And just above, see Freud’s dia­gram for “The Psy­chi­cal Mech­a­nism of For­get­ful­ness” from 1898, depict­ing “asso­cia­tive links between var­i­ous con­scious, pre­con­scious and uncon­scious word pre­sen­ta­tions.”

It is in these late nine­teenth-cen­tu­ry dia­grams that we see Freud make the defin­i­tive move from empir­i­cal­ly observed illus­tra­tions of phys­i­cal structures—like the 1878 “Spinal Gan­glia and Spinal Chord of Petromy­zom” above—to rela­tions between ideas and “con­cep­tu­al enti­ties that have no tan­gi­ble exis­tence in the phys­i­cal world.” That shift, gen­er­al­ly marked by the pub­li­ca­tion of Stud­ies in Hys­te­ria in 1895, caused Freud some unease. “Look­ing back over his career 30 years lat­er,” writes Mark Solms, “ his long­ing for the com­fort­able respectabil­i­ty of his ear­li­er career is still evi­dent.” Even at the time, Freud would write in Stud­ies in Hys­te­ria that his case his­to­ries “lack the seri­ous stamp of sci­ence.” Though his stud­ies of eel, lam­prey, and human brains involved tan­gi­ble, observ­able phe­nom­e­na, he approached the new dis­ci­pline of psy­cho­analy­sis with no less rig­or, stat­ing only that the “the nature of the sub­ject” had changed, not his method.

The draw­ings, writes Bene­dict Carey in the New York Times, “tell a sto­ry in three acts, from biol­o­gy to psy­chol­o­gy, from the micro­scope to the couch.” As Freud makes the tran­si­tion, his metic­u­lous­ly detailed med­ical work, copied from glass slides, gives way to loose out­lines. One draw­ing of the brain’s audi­to­ry sys­tem from 1886 (above) “is as spare and geo­met­ric as a Calder sculp­ture.” Just a few years lat­er, Freud sketched out the dia­gram below in 1894, a schemat­ic, writes Solms, of “the rela­tion­ship between var­i­ous nor­mal and patho­log­i­cal mood states and sex­u­al phys­i­ol­o­gy.” It’s his first pure­ly psy­cho­an­a­lyt­ic draw­ing, sketched in a let­ter to a col­league, Dr. Wil­helm Fleiss.

In the lat­er dia­grams, as we see above, his ten­ta­tive free­hand gave way to type­script and a tech­ni­cal draughtsman’s pre­ci­sion, with some draw­ings resem­bling, in Carey’s words, “the schemat­ic for an air-con­di­tion­ing sys­tem.” Freud seems to com­ment on the archi­tec­tur­al nature of these dia­grams when he writes in The Inter­pre­ta­tion of Dreams in 1900, “We are jus­ti­fied, in my view, in giv­ing free reign to our spec­u­la­tions so long as we retain the cool­ness of our judg­ment, and do not mis­take the scaf­fold­ing for the build­ing.” It’s a warn­ing many of Freud’s dis­ci­ples may not have heed­ed care­ful­ly enough.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

How a Young Sig­mund Freud Researched & Got Addict­ed to Cocaine, the New “Mir­a­cle Drug,” in 1894

Sig­mund Freud Writes to Con­cerned Moth­er: “Homo­sex­u­al­i­ty is Noth­ing to Be Ashamed Of” (1935)

Sig­mund Freud Appears in Rare, Sur­viv­ing Video & Audio Record­ed Dur­ing the 1930s

Free Online Psy­chol­o­gy Cours­es

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness