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"The New Unconscious" Sigmund Freud understood the unconscious as a place of libidinal repression. Art in turn found inspiration in psychoanalysis—surrealism took as its manifesto Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams (1913), and later abstract expressionism explored the irrational desires of the Freudian unconscious. With new technologies of the 21st century, science exposed a deeper mental reality and proved that human behavior is the product of an endless stream of perceptions, feelings, and thoughts, at both the conscious and unconscious levels. Even with technologies today that allow for an empirical observation of the mind, reality itself is still debated. As in gestalt theory, the brain completes external imagery the eye cannot produce—all done at an unconscious level. If a central function of the unconscious is to fill in the blanks in order to construct a useful picture of reality, how does this affect our understanding of the world? “The New Unconscious” explores how human behavior is dually dictated by the conscious and unconscious mind. ​- Curated by Danielle Kalamaras