ROOTS OF HYPERTEXT: WILLIAM S BURROUGHS
William S. Burroughs and Cut-up
By Dan Century
Chain Border
For the uninitiated, the Cut-up technique was inspired by the collage technique used by artists and photographers. Often the greatest photographs and artwork happen by accident. An unexpected pedestrian walks into your shot, or an odd glob of paint scars your painting, and rather than tragedy you have something unexpected and spontaneous. Take this concept one step further and the artist can juxtapose various visual fragments with great and unexpected results. Gysin and Burroughs wanted to introduce the spontaneity and chance of the collage to the written word, and so they developed and utilized the Cut-up technique.
The technique is simple. Take any page of writing. Take a scissors and cut it into four parts; cut straight across, down the middle, on angles, whatever. Now reassemble the parts at random. You now have a different text. Meaning, time lines and narratives are changed. The result may be quite similar to the original or shockingly different. The more cuts you make and the more sources you use, the more fun you'll have. The beauty of the Cut-up method is anyone can do it, and should do it; anyone can now be a great writer, if only by chance. Unfortunately this technique works better with paper than computer text, because you cannot easily (if at all) make vertical cuts on an electronic page. One method you could use would be to capture your screen as an image, and then use image editing software to cut it up, and OCR software to return it to text form.
Here's some ideas for you:
Experiment #1:
a. Go to Police headquarters and grab up some scary pamphlets on drug abuse, deer ticks, cyber crime, domestic violence. Read them for kicks and then get some scissors and cut them into chunks.
b. Go to your poetry notebook, or that file where you keep the first chapters to the half dozen or so short stories you plan on finishing one day. Get a scissors. Cut them up. Or, photo-copy them, and cut up the copies.
c. Arrange the chunks at random, but not consciously at random. Many times in our conscious effort to be random or spontaneous, we achieve the opposite effect.
d. Now read the results. Prepare to laugh, or at the very least impress yourself.
Experiment #2:
a. Collect an assortment of text sources: your writing, your diary, a few web pages printed out at random, a newspaper, a famous book, some pamphlets from the rack in the lobby of the supermarket, anything!
b. Next time you have a campfire place them at the edge of the fire so they become partially consumed.
c. Sift through the ashes, find the remaining fragments, and you have your story. Granted, this technique is a little extreme and you may end up with nothing but ash, however, imagine the results otherwise.
By Dan Century
Chain Border
For the uninitiated, the Cut-up technique was inspired by the collage technique used by artists and photographers. Often the greatest photographs and artwork happen by accident. An unexpected pedestrian walks into your shot, or an odd glob of paint scars your painting, and rather than tragedy you have something unexpected and spontaneous. Take this concept one step further and the artist can juxtapose various visual fragments with great and unexpected results. Gysin and Burroughs wanted to introduce the spontaneity and chance of the collage to the written word, and so they developed and utilized the Cut-up technique.
The technique is simple. Take any page of writing. Take a scissors and cut it into four parts; cut straight across, down the middle, on angles, whatever. Now reassemble the parts at random. You now have a different text. Meaning, time lines and narratives are changed. The result may be quite similar to the original or shockingly different. The more cuts you make and the more sources you use, the more fun you'll have. The beauty of the Cut-up method is anyone can do it, and should do it; anyone can now be a great writer, if only by chance. Unfortunately this technique works better with paper than computer text, because you cannot easily (if at all) make vertical cuts on an electronic page. One method you could use would be to capture your screen as an image, and then use image editing software to cut it up, and OCR software to return it to text form.
Here's some ideas for you:
Experiment #1:
a. Go to Police headquarters and grab up some scary pamphlets on drug abuse, deer ticks, cyber crime, domestic violence. Read them for kicks and then get some scissors and cut them into chunks.
b. Go to your poetry notebook, or that file where you keep the first chapters to the half dozen or so short stories you plan on finishing one day. Get a scissors. Cut them up. Or, photo-copy them, and cut up the copies.
c. Arrange the chunks at random, but not consciously at random. Many times in our conscious effort to be random or spontaneous, we achieve the opposite effect.
d. Now read the results. Prepare to laugh, or at the very least impress yourself.
Experiment #2:
a. Collect an assortment of text sources: your writing, your diary, a few web pages printed out at random, a newspaper, a famous book, some pamphlets from the rack in the lobby of the supermarket, anything!
b. Next time you have a campfire place them at the edge of the fire so they become partially consumed.
c. Sift through the ashes, find the remaining fragments, and you have your story. Granted, this technique is a little extreme and you may end up with nothing but ash, however, imagine the results otherwise.
I remember having cut up sessions in an open mic poetry group in college (the beat writers were having a resurgence in popularity thanks to the first publication of Wired magazine among others). The point you make about not being to "cut" things on an electronic page is only true in a concrete, traditional sense. Tools such as Wordle (www.wordle.net) let one take a passage of text and change it to a visual representation that brings out the words or ideas that are used most frequently. In that representation, the word/idea that is used most frequently appears the largest. Burroughs's idea was to break something up and look at it differently, focusing on different patterns which is what happens when you take text and create a visual textual representation like a word cloud.
ReplyDeleteTo me, the cut-up method sounds like a way to get rid of writer's block by obtaining an idea from different sources and trying to make something new, unique and creative out of it. I read somewhere (I'm thinking it was from a similar source) that even musicians like Bono have used the cut-up method to write their lyrics.
ReplyDeleteIn my perspective, the Cut-Up method doesn't just apply to textual work, but also visual/graphic as well. I am on of the known flyer designers on campus >>> madcreationsgfx.shutterfly.com <<< >>> madcreationsgfx.blogspot.com <<<, and i design flyers for various greeklife, as well as other avenues. I, on a daily basis, try to outdue myself in each endeavor I partake, but often feel then need to find out more about what i'm doing and what more i could do to over-achieve. Thus, i find myself implementing the Cut-Up method by separating previous graphic layers of my past projects, and mixing them into the present project. I also tend to look at other professional flyers produced, and, with my completed flyers, take several aspects from several flyers to make a new masterpiece.
ReplyDelete