Cut-Up Machine

The Cut-Up Machine mixes up the words you enter in a form, a la William S. Burroughs and the Dadaists. This creates new and often surprising juxtapositions of words that can inspire creativity.

Type or paste some text into the field below. Click "Cut It Up". Your cut up text will appear in a text field below the "Cut it Up" button.

Cut Up Text:

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The Cut Up Technique

Cut-up is performed by taking a finished and fully linear text and cutting it in pieces with a few or single words on each piece. The resulting pieces are then rearranged into a new text.

The History of Cut Ups

A precedent of the technique occurred during a Dadaist rally in the 1920s in which Tristan Tzara offered to create a poem on the spot by pulling words at random from a hat. Collage, which was popularized roughly contemporaneously with the Surrealist movement, sometimes incorporated texts such as newspapers or brochures. Prior to this event, the technique had been published in an issue of 391 in the poem by Tzara, dada manifesto on feeble love and bitter love under the sub-title, TO MAKE A DADAIST POEM.

Burroughs cited T. S. Eliot's poem, The Waste Land (1922) and John Dos Passos' U.S.A. trilogy, which incorporated newspaper clippings, as early examples of the cut ups he popularized.

Gil J. Wolman developed cut-up techniques as part of his lettrist practice in the early 1950s.

Also in the 1950s, painter and writer Brion Gysin more fully developed the cut-up method after accidentally re-discovering it. He had placed layers of newspapers as a mat to protect a tabletop from being scratched while he cut papers with a razor blade. Upon cutting through the newspapers, Gysin noticed that the sliced layers offered interesting juxtapositions of text and image. He began deliberately cutting newspaper articles into sections, which he randomly rearranged. The book Minutes to Go resulted from his initial cut-up experiment: unedited and unchanged cut-ups which emerged as coherent and meaningful prose. South African poet Sinclair Beiles also used this technique and co-authored Minutes To Go.

Gysin introduced Burroughs to the technique at the Beat Hotel. The pair later applied the technique to printed media and audio recordings 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 saying, "When you cut into the present the future leaks out." Burroughs also further developed the "fold-in" technique. In 1977, Burroughs and Gysin published The Third Mind, a collection of cut-up writings and essays on the form. Jeff Nuttall's publication My Own Mag was another important outlet for the then-radical technique.

In an interview, Alan Burns noted that for Europe After The Rain (1965) and subsequent novels he used a version of cut-ups: "I did not actually use scissors, but I folded pages, read across columns, and so on, discovering for myself many of the techniques Burroughs and Gysin describe".

Argentine writer Julio Cortazar often used cut ups in his 1963 novel Hopscotch.

Musical influence

From the early 1970s, David Bowie has used cut-ups to create some of his lyrics. This technique influenced Kurt Cobain's songwriting. Thom Yorke applied a similar method in Radiohead's Kid A (2000) album, writing single lines, putting them into a hat, and drawing them out at random while the band rehearsed the songs.

Burroughs taught the cut-up technique to musician Genesis P-Orridge in 1971 as a method for "altering reality". H/er explanation was that everything is recorded, and if it is recorded, then it can be edited.

Stephen Mallinder of Cabaret Voltaire reported to Inpress magazine's Andrez Bergen that "I do think the manipulation of sound in our early days - the physical act of cutting up tapes, creating tape loops and all that - has a strong reference to Burroughs and Gysin...."

source: Wikipedia

This Cut-Up Machine appeared at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art exhibition, "Alchemy of Words: Abraham Abulafia, Dada, Lettrism" from June-November 2016

On the occasion of the 100th Anniversary of DADA, the Tel Aviv Museum of Art presented a unique exhibition of works by artists influenced by the pan-European DADA movement in the early 20th century alongside manuscripts and contemporary sound performances associated with the medieval mystic Abraham Abulafia (1240- c.1292), who developed a "Kabbalah of Names."

Both deconstruct or atomize words into individual consonants and vowels, and reorganize them in new and surprising ways, vocalizing them in sound poems. The subversion of the normal word order and its semantic meaning lends a fresh graphic presence to the page of text. The overriding of reason is, for them, a means to new creativity.

On show were some 60 sound and video performances, films, works on paper, illustrated books, and paintings by leading Dada artists Tristan Tzara, Hugo Ball, Jean Arp, Marcel Janco, Kurt Schwitters, George Grosz, Francis Picabia, Max Ernst, Ilizad, Erwin Blumenfeld, Victor Brauner, Marcel Duchamp; and Lettrist artists Isidore Isou, Gabriel Pomerand, Jean-Louis Brau, Gil J. Wolman, François Lemaître, François Duprêne; as well as the poets Henri Michaux and Yvan Goll; and works by Ladislav Novák, John Cage, George Brecht, and Brion Gysin. Israeli artists: Mirit Cohen, Yosef-Joseph-Ya'akov Dadoune, Ori Gersht, Eli Petel, Michael Sgan-Cohen, and sound artists Victoria Hanna and Anat Pick. A special section of the exhibition was dedicated to Charlie Chaplin, an icon of the Dada movement.

Abulafia and the technique of ars combinatoria has had a major impact on contemporary discourse, from Umberto Eco to Jacques Derrida, engendering works of literature, theater, film, and art. New scholarship has confirmed a direct connection to Abulafia of the Lettrist leader Isidore Isou and the Dada-affiliated poet Yvan Goll.

The exhibition featured works from the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, and public and private collections from Israel, France, and Switzerland.

OPENING DATE: Friday 17 June 2016. CLOSING DATE: Saturday 19 November 2016. LOCATION: Ruth and Bruce Rappaport Sculpture Gallery, Main Building. CURATOR: Dr. Batsheva Goldman-Ida.

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Alchemy of Words Exhibition Catalogue

Alchemy of Words Exhibition Photos