"What is clear and concise can't deal with reality, for what is real is to be surrounded by mystery."
- James Joyce
What is Cut-up? |
"Cut-up" , in the strictest, traditional definition is a process whereby an author fragments paper texts with a pair of scissors, and then reassembles the words or phrases either randomly or according to some pattern which has little or nothing to do with the text's original meaning: 
an example of a traditional paper-and-scissors cut-up A completed novel, story or poem might also be referred to as a "cut-up" if the end product reads as if it has been composed using the cut-up technique. As a genre of writing, cut-up has been described as "literary slapdash", "textual vomit" and even "pure esoteric sensationalism". Cut-up writing is often hard (or even impossible) to understand and those who admire it might find themselves in the same "dubious" category as the William S. Burroughs character who is fond of centipedes. |
The process currently described as the "cut-up" technique is said to have originated at the beginning of the 20th century when Tristan Tzara, poet and co-founder of Dadaism randomly pulled words out of a hat to compose an on-the-spot automatic poem. The process of randomly rearranging words within sentences or letters within words became part of Dada and Surrealist theory.
There is also evidence that the cut-up process (in the sense that it can most basically be described as the random juxtapositioning of words) may have been used by William Shakespeare. While computer - based cut-up engines are great for randomly shuffling text, they do not facilitate the essential second step of cut-up composition: intentional reordering. In a paper-and-scissors cut-up session, you can quickly reorder the words without having to use the cut, copy and paste commands of a word processor application. In other words, for cut-up composition, the the paper-and-scissors interface is actually better. The text area on this page provides input to a server application which will construct a paper - based cut-up simulation : a screen presenting a random reordering of the submitted words in which the words may be dragged around the screen. Type or paste your input text here: The Cut-up Laboratory is a demonstration of one of the many word manipulation functions found in the Cut'n'Mix Word Machine application. In addition to cut-ups, Cut'n'Mix can: generate random poetry and random word pools, slice, dice and blend words, format text into "ransom notes" and allow users to create custom word databases. You can download Cut'n'Mix from the link below:  Download Cut 'n' Mix 5.3
(6.1 MB, Windows XP or Vista required. This installer contains a fully-functional 7-day trial. For continued use beyond the trial period, a license key can be purchased for $14.99. Purchase instructions are contained in the application.) Video tutorial: Using Cut'n'Mix: video music by Free Soundtrack Music |
Cut'n'Mix control panel
This site is host to the most advanced cut-up automation and text randomization software available: The Cut 'n' Mix Word Machine. Cut 'n' Mix goes beyond the simple random remixing of a small chunk of pasted text to allow mixing of up to four text sources, with additional features to control the size of words processed and how they are combined from each input file. To download, or find out more about Cut 'n' Mix functions, read the:
Cut 'n' Mix User Guide
