SENT: William Burroughs Method Cut-Up Mail-Art to Diane Keys (Elgin, Illinois, USA)

[De Villo Sloan]

Cut-up mail-art to IUOMA member Diane Keys (Elgin, Illinois, USA)

 

September 13, 2011 - Diane Keys sent me a D-Koder ring. I wanted to thank her, and I felt like doing a cut-up using the trademark William Burroughs method. Of course there are variations and individual choices you make. Here is the method, which is very simple. Start with a text. Any text will do. In this case, here is my original to DK:

 

Cut the text up into pieces. The most standard way is folding. Try to look at the writing as little as possible. Think of it as just a piece of material you are cutting up. In this case, I decided to preserve entire words. You can cut it up into as many pieces as you like. Here are the pieces:

 

Re-arrange the pieces as randomly as possible. Throw them in the air. Shuffle them like cards, anything to mix them up. I shuffled them like cards, and they came out in this order:

 

Turn them over and you have your new, cut-up text:

 

With slight editing, I made a final draft:

 

A simple method that can at times produce interesting results.

[De Villo Sloan]

haiku

 

Thank you for the

green crushed rat. Disappointment

it was kind

[De Villo Sloan]

Oh yeah, and your fortune idea is absolutely valid. This has been around for a long time, and many of the people didn't necessarily view it as some exercise in chance - seeing it instead as having a spiritual component like a Ouija Board or something, depending on your views about other worlds, their nature, and what inhabits them - I'm just reporting the facts, mam.

[De Villo Sloan]

Thanks, Marie. We've had a number of IUOMA dialogs (many with Erni Baer) that talk about Burroughs' cut-ups and collage texts. There's some confusion, as they are different. This is the cut-up method - as you can see introducing a certain element of chance is essential. This is very simple and can be done practically by anyone anywhere. This kind of practice has also advanced considerably on other fronts, using software to generate random word texts. In my brief foray into statistics, I was fascinated most with random number sequences. Of course, words, phrases, texts and sentences can be built into those models and more complex models are developed. Actually, we face the bizarre situation that poetry can be generated by computers, almost into eternity. If you ascribe to any of it, the "author" is pretty much obsolete.

[Marie Wintzer]

Brilliant!!! I actually like the individual cut up pieces better than the final draft. Wow, I love this. You could also make fortunes out of it. Disappointment. It was kind...