William S. Burroughs

Matti Niinimäki created this video, which visualizes William S. Burrough’s thoughts on the origin and theory of Tape Cut-Ups.

via RichardMetzger

Cut-up text is an aleatory literary technique in which a text is cut up at random and rearranged to create a new text.

It was used notably by William S. Burroughs in the late 60’s and early 70’s, and influenced the work of David Bowie, Curt Cobain and others. More recently, cut-up text has been used by email spammers to create text that will get around spam filters. Because of the huge volume of spam that is generated, some interesting examples have emerged, which are called “spamoetry.”

Here’s an example:

Then, from sea to shining sea, the God-King sang the praises of teflon, and with his face to the sunshine, he churned lots of butter.

The Cutup Engine cuts up text and makes something different out of the pieces. You can provide the text directly, or URLs of things on the web.

Here’s a randomized chunk of a recent Synthtopia article:

more occupied the time, including DJs, as the one we DJs, promoters and camera men doing it, but in pretend to the head in promoters and with her dancing two CDs, and she was when she involved in any kind crowd that she was really DJ, when she just acting. to get in fact the movements the mixer to pretend the DJ box at the use in the movements to get involved the time, including DJs, promoters in the DJ box at DJs, promoters and camera set from one or two music set from one or her dancing movements real, just acting.

an already pre-mixed music at the time, including she was faking the movements of beat-matching or mixing. for real, just acting.” she was really any kind mixing the from a tiny CD wallet as the one and was just movements to get we use box at the and was just making purely a fraud. 

via strangeattractor