The Cut-Up Technique

Popularized and developed by the Dadaists and William S. Burroughs, the Cut-Up Technique initially involved slicing up text documents and then rearranging them, looking for new interesting patterns and literary phenomenons. This general idea, however, has evolved into music and video with remixes.

While the cut-up technique is interesting, I think that it takes more work than perhaps it initially seems. I have a colleague who used a computer to randomly sequence words from a returned war vet's interview and Homer's Odyssey. He held himself to a rule though, that the computer would randomly generate the lines, and he had to either accept or reject the line, he could not modify it.

That said, his version of the cut-up technique was actually highly structured, and wasn't just attempting to have some sort of esoteric intent. In fact, it involved the same literary techniques he would normally employ, but used the advantages of technology to provide his base "atoms" of content (or cut-up words, so to speak).

The Cut-Up Technique