The cut-up technique is a specialised literary form or magickal tool in which a text is cut up at random and rearranged to create a new text.
At a Dadaist rally in the 1920s, Tristan Tzara offered to create a poem on the spot by pulling words at random from a hat. A riot ensued and Andre Breton expelled Tzara from the movement. This is the first recorded use of the cut-up technique.
The cut-up method was more fully developed in the 1950s by the painter and writer Brion Gysin. Gysin started to cut newspaper articles into sections and rearranged the sections at random. "Minutes to Go" resulted from this initial cut-up experiment: unedited and unchanged cut-ups which emerge as coherent and meaningful prose. Gysin introduced the writer William S. Burroughs to the technique at the Beat Hotel; the pair later applied the technique to printed media and audio recordings alike in an effort to decode the material's implicit content, hypothesizing that such a technique could be used to discover the true meaning of a given 'text.' Burroughs also suggested cut-ups may be effective as a form of divination: "Perhaps events are pre-written and pre-recorded and when you cut word lines the future leaks out."
Genesis P-Orridge was taught this technique in 1971 by William S. Burroughs as a magickal tool for altering reality. His explanation for this was that everything is recorded, and if it is recorded, then it can be edited.(P-Orridge, 2003) P-Orridge has long employed cut-ups as an applied philosophy, a way of creating art and music, and of conducting one's life.
Other musicians working in sample-based genres such as Hip Hop and Electronic Music employ a similar technique. DJs especially value "digging," or spending hours in record stores looking for LP records featuring obscure breaks, vocals, and samples to meld together in new compositions. Some have suggested these practices are a form of cut-ups, but most such musicians are probably unaware of Tzara, Burroughs or Gysin (DJ Spooky being an exception). On the other hand, musique concrete had introduced such techniques much earlier in a musical (as opposed to literary) context.
Jeff Noon uses a similar "remixing" technique in his writing based on the practices prevalent in Dub music. He expanded upon his remixing with his Cobralingus system, which breaks down a piece of writing, going as far as turning individual words into anagrams, then melding the results into a narrative.
The pop-artist David Bowie is also an adherent of the cut-up method in the construction of many of his lyrics.
A recent phenomenon is an E-mail spam tactic in which randomly-generated text passages are used to thwart Bayesian filters:
- The first question of course was, how to get dry again: they me as I walked, the remembrance of my churlishness and that I must confidence between himself and Mrs. Micawber. After which, he for his dagger till his hand gripped it. Then he spoke. I kissed her, and my baby brother, and was very sorry then; but not
Such text is referred to as spamoetry (spam poetry) or spam art. Since the text is often derived from actual books, this is effectively a cut-up method (though the perpetrators may be unaware of this).
See also
External links
- General Info
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Fluctuation A good example of the cut-up technique applied to the creation of poetry.
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UbuWeb: William S. Burroughs featuring a cut-up, K-9 Was in Combat with the Alien Mind-Screens (1965), made with Ian Sommerville
- Online Cut-Up Tools
References
Last updated: 05-07-2005 17:27:17
Last updated: 05-13-2005 07:56:04
