Cut-up technique - Definition and Overview

The cut-up technique is a specialised literary form in which a text is cut up at random and rearranged to create a new text.

At a surrealist 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.

The cut up method was more fully developed later. In the 1950s the painter and writer Brion 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." [1] (http://gorgeaway.blogspot.com/)

Some 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 aware 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.

The pop-artists David Bowie and Gary Numan are also adherents of the cut-up method in the construction of many of their lyrics.

Genesis P-Orridge has long employed the technique as an applied philosophy, and as a way of creating art and music and of conducting one's life.

See also

• cubomania
• latent news
• Markov chain
• Exquisite corpse
• Industrial Records
• plunderphonics

External links

• Lazarus Corporation Text Mixing Desk (http://www.lazaruscorporation.co.uk/v4/cutup) is online software that manipulates your text using the cut-up technique.
• Fluctuation (http://www.fluctuation.co.uk/articles/01poetry.html) A good example of the cut-up technique applied to the creation of poetry.
• UbuWeb: William S. Burroughs (http://www.ubu.com/sound/burroughs.html) featuring a cut-up, K-9 Was in Combat with the Alien Mind-Screens (1965), made with Ian Sommerville
• God's Rude Wireless (http://www.godsrudewireless.co.uk/cutup1st.htm) hosts a cut-up engine running on very simple Javascript, as well as some other language manipulation tools.