Rorschach Audio lecture by Joe Banks

Freud Museum, London, 23 July 2015

7pm (sharp) to 8.30

The book “Rorschach Audio - Art & Illusion for Sound”, by author and installation artist Joe Banks, takes as its central metaphor the comparison between the perception of ambiguous speech sounds, and the “projective” interpretation of the famous ink-blot tests devised by the Freudian psychoanalyst Hermann Rorschach in 1921. With a nod to the model of perception proposed in volume 23 of Freud’s “Complete Psychological Works”, the “Rorschach Audio” lecture-demonstration explores relationships between mechanisms of aural and visual perception, demonstrating a series of highly entertaining and sometimes bizarre psychoacoustic and optical illusions.

With a further nod to ideas proposed in Sigmund Freud’s “The Future of An Illusion”, the lecture focusses on a critique of Spiritualistic and allegedly supernatural Electronic Voice Phenomena (ghost-voice) recordings, a theme wildly popular in contemporary sound installation art, tracing the illusions involved as far back as the artist generally recognised as the most important figure in the history of Western art, and emphasising the role that relatively little-known wartime intelligence work with sound had on what is arguably the most important work of visual arts theory ever published.

The Freud Museum

20 Maresfield Gardens

London NW3 5SX

contact - eventsandmedia@freud.org.uk

0207 435 2002