The Symposium

I did these illustrations to be projected during the live show of RadioLab's 'Desperately Seeking Symmetry' podcast [link]

They illustrate the Aristophanes speech of Plato's Symposium. It's an explanation of why people in love say they feel ‘whole’. The jist is that there were originally three types of people, each with two heads, two sets of limbs and two sets of genitals (men-men, women-women and men-women.) Zeus, annoyed about something or other and presumably overreacting, decided to chop them all in half and since then we’ve spent our lives wandering around trying to find our original other half, thus explaining our longing for a partner and our inclinations towards homosexual or heterosexual love. Read a better summary here [link]