The Huge Entity: Forum - The Art of The Cut-Up

The Art of The Cut-Up

Danieru — Tue, 28 Nov 2006 09:22:42 -0700

The Father of beatnik, William Burroughs, devised a technique by which one's writing may be cleansed of its cultural and semantic bias. This technique has since been known as The Cut-Up. As Burroughs himself commented:

All writing is in fact cut-ups. A collage of words read, heard, overheard. What else? Use of scissors renders the process explicit and subject to extension and variation. Clear classical prose can be composed entirely of rearranged cut-ups. Cutting and rearranging a page of written words introduces a new dimension into writing enabling the writer to turn images in cinematic variation. Images shift sense under the scissors smell images to sound sight to sound to kinesthetic. - link to more Burroughs quotes on Cut-up

Today I found myself gripped by the urge to do cut-up myself and so, using a couple of automatic cut-up generators I found on the internet (Non-Linear Adding Machine & The Lazarus Text-Mixing Desk), I began to experiment.

Taking a chunk of text I have been working on (for a young-adult novel) and editing the disjointed cut-up into a more manageable form I acheived these results.

[...See full post here...]

Try it yourself at the links above and please feel free to come and share the results here or on the main site...

And remember Language is a Virus...

The Art of The Cut-Up

what? — Mon, 04 Dec 2006 19:21:23 -0700

AUTOMATIC CUT UP GENERATORS! WHERE ARE MY SCISSORS!
I've been as dry as a dead dingo's donger...how can i contribute to this deluge; great blocks of text crashing down on my head like calves from a collapsing glacier...the only thing that amuses me at the moment is instructional english produced by east asian orphanage factories.

The Art of The Cut-Up

constructivist — Wed, 13 Dec 2006 01:01:52 -0700

you know, i know, i think we all know that this is, in a word,

bullshit.

i don't mean this as an affront to Danieru but, a psudeorandom mash-up of previously intelligible text can not and will not reveal any novel information. It's more akin to madlibs than a poet!

The Art of The Cut-Up

Danieru — Wed, 13 Dec 2006 04:53:24 -0700

novel information? maybe not, but perspective shift? perhaps...

writing can be transgressive, but it can also be self deceptive. trying to derive new metaphors with which to better expound a universe (whether real or imagined) is never an easy task. any tool which one can use to break the contraints of one's own, single, isolated view point is a godsend.

plus, naked lunch is one of my favourite books. its all a matter of muwump gizum

The Art of The Cut-Up

constructivist — Wed, 13 Dec 2006 07:08:27 -0700

Bug powder dust an' mugwump jism
And the wild boys runnin' 'round Interzone trippin'
Letter to control about the Big Brother
Try like hard to not blow my cover

{courtesy of Bomb the Bass}

The Art of The Cut-Up

what? — Fri, 15 Dec 2006 05:07:01 -0700

Like a markoff chain in a random number series, meaning may appear anywhere, I don't think 'we', whatever the hell we may be, have anything to do with it. We're passive observers with the delusions of control...I know because I still haven't stopped smoking.

The Art of The Cut-Up

alexanderj — Tue, 26 Dec 2006 17:01:56 -0700

I have a very hard time coping with the effects of the library of babel on my mind. Its like, so depressing and easying that I feel like choking and vomiting random bits of randomness up for no apparent reason whatsoever..

The Art of The Cut-Up

Madnicity — Thu, 28 Dec 2006 02:35:11 -0700

So you toss a bunch of random words into a pile et voila Metaphor?

A googel of monkey's typing could do as much? (Probably not) but what a fun thing to do. The downside is that you won't attract much readership outside of a few pretentious literary snobs who believe is obfuscation as coolness.

Still it does strike me as more fun tham serious. Then again this fellow made a career out of separating the meaning of a word from it's designation.

The Art of The Cut-Up

alexanderj — Thu, 28 Dec 2006 12:41:20 -0700

Its like.. the fall of values. Its reductive logic, right? Same thing as random noise being equal to Bachs fugas.. I got a PHD report on the subject cached somewhere on my laptop.
What I find intriguing as hell are the way synaesthesia trancends the gap between sound and sight - dig the way that morsecodes work!

The Art of The Cut-Up

Madnicity — Thu, 28 Dec 2006 18:00:46 -0700

Posted By: alexanderjIts like.. the fall of values. Its reductive logic, right? Same thing as random noise being equal to Bachs fugas..

Not quite since random noise may be unstructured but cut-up is.

You separate the meaning of the symbols without destroying the logic of their relationship.

The Art of The Cut-Up

alexanderj — Wed, 31 Jan 2007 09:01:08 -0700

Not quite since random noise may be unstructured but cut-up is.

You separate the meaning of the symbols without destroying the logic of their relationship.

I think I know what you mean, but im not sure. Would you please explain?

The Art of The Cut-Up

mrfilmmaker666 — Mon, 05 Mar 2007 15:18:07 -0700

lately ive been working on a cut up project with a friend out of country...he's been sending me random writings/extracts and ive been manipulating them around. I dont know where he finds them but they are most random and most pointess and i barely understand what they are really meaning to say, but ive turned them around into my own poems, here's a few ive been working on;

Bloom error
at the mirror
addressing nobody in particular
imploring the errors of ancestry
affrighted fleshing all around
reaching half down
uprooting the ought to speak
a four inch laceration
left Polly to groan over in the dungeon of
all one's life in an interactive man, who says
one of the most important sources of U is
a top three imported cut flower
brush off
a flame of a candle is
for carving what?
the key
if it makes me grow smaller
cheer up this sober old house. won't we?

all in line?
a reverse direction car crash should end this
new hat held on me
No one wanted to hear it
since many animals have no head.
cant blame em for having more interest in the weather
The same is true with regard to all Highland folk alike
Im sorry, i am never quick
suppose that we'll make yet greater progress
When the door opens again
we wont know what anyones talking about
while at the extremities of the universe
attributes are removed and that alone is left
is it so plain I am an ill being ?
....under certain conditions

The Art of The Cut-Up

what? — Tue, 06 Mar 2007 00:09:48 -0700

Now that makes more sense to me than anything I've read recently.
I've been waiting for that bloody door to open again for ages.