Cut up or Generate?
In his article ‘‘The Future of The Novel’’, William Burroughs fascinates the reader with a method. A method where you can play with time. Shift it forwards to the future, while tracking it back to the past simultaneously. Burroughs relates this method to film when writing flashbacks, allowing the writer to move flexibly through his timeline. This method is referred to as cut-ups. Cut-ups were in no way, shape, or form created by William Burroughs. It was, as a matter of fact, American painter Brion Gysin who introduced cut-ups to Burroughs. From there, Burroughs adapted this technique, popularized it, and formed his own method, fold-in. But what is the cut-ups method? And what does it reminisce?
To put it in simple terms, cut-ups is the process of taking pages or snippets of text, cutting them up, and then forming new radical literary pieces based on combining different lines together. Fold-in is taking a page of text, folding it down the middle, and putting it on another page. The concepts of these processes sound rather simple. But in order to produce comprehensive, expressive pieces of work (much like William Burroughs› three cut-ups/fold-in novels: Nova Express, The Ticket That Exploded, The Soft Machine), one must be patient and willing to go through the ordeal of arranging, rearranging, and finding fitting context for these lines. In “Future of The Novel’’, Burroughs describes the method of cut-ups/fold-in in an interesting manner:
“For example I take page one and fold it into page one hundred — I insert the resulting composite as page ten — When the reader reads page ten he is flashing forward in time to page one hundred and back in time to page one.”
The history of cut-ups, whether to be traced as text, photographic or graphic collages, has always been revolutionary. The idea of bringing various perspectives, observations, and talents into a single creative piece was undeniably striking. One of the rather impactful examples that would constantly come to mind, is Tristan Tzara. One of the founders of the dadaist movement, who wrote a poem in 1920, where he encouraged the reader to engage with cut-ups:
‘‘Take a newspaper.
Take some scissors.
Choose from this paper an article the length you want to make your poem.
Cut out the article.
Next, carefully cut out each of the words that make up this article and put them all in a bag.
Shake gently.
Next, take out each cutting one after the other.
Copy conscientiously in the order in which they left the bag.
The poem will resemble you.
And there you are — an infinitely original author of charming sensibility, even though unappreciated by the vulgar herd.’’
Another form of art that cut-ups were inspired by is collage. Dadaist artist were pioneers in combining photographs or fragments of photographs with text and print. The collages often created a vast juxtaposition due to the different sources in which the photographs and prints were brought from.
Despite cut ups being a very effective form of expression and a strong method of creating compelling literary work, there has been other techniques to construct text passages that go hand in hand with the media and the technological developments. Generative literature is one of them. Generative literature, according to Jean-Pierre Balpe, is producing text using computers by relying on a set of formal rules. Usually, the author has no control over what the computer is going to generate, but they could control minor aspects such as the conceptual models or the dictionary in which the computer will use to generate text. One type of generative literature is continuously changing literary text where there are passages on a website and specific nouns, verbs, or actions keep varying. For instance, Nick Montfort, a poet and professor of digital media in MIT, collaborated with people from numerous fields in order to create ‘‘The Two’’. The Two is a website (and book) that continuously generates short stories (in six languages) and keeps replacing the nouns and actions with a diversity of other words. The creator of the website coded the words that should replace each other and the duration in which the change happens.
Another type is the AI generative literature, where you type a certain term or line and a network predicts what’ll be typed next and generates text based on its prediction. The AI generative literature goes through thousands of passages in order to identify with what a person is typing or what is trying to convey. Overall, generative literature is being embraced rapidly. Whether in poetry or in text.
Experiment
Cut ups and generative Literature are somehow similar, yet drastically different. When looking at both techniques, one wonders which method is more valid, and rather more practical. Which is why I decided to conduct an experiment. The experiment focused on producing two posters. The first one uses the cut ups technique and the second one uses generative literature. In order to proceed with the experiment, I needed to find topics to discuss. For the first poster, I chose Bauhaus. For the second poster, I chose Walter Gropius, as both topics are interrelated. For the first poster, I scanned and printed pages from a book about Bauhaus, and started the process of cutting up. Each line consisted of words or sentences from different pages of the book that I felt were appropriate for the line. I then began placing each line under the other in the order that I thought made sense.
Later on, I designed a poster that matches the Bauhaus aesthetics, which was minimal and basic, and I though it somehow reflected on what was written in the cut-ups.
For the second poster, I used an AI generative literature website that predicts the words that someone is going to write next and states the percentage of which word is more likely to get chosen. The process was slow and it required selecting each word guessed individually.
I then designed a poster that corresponds to the first design, and at the same time works well with the topic, and states what the website generated.
In conclusion, and based on my experiment, I found that the cut-ups method is more practical and amusing to execute. It pushed me to think and it was more thrilling to produce meaningful sentences and try hard to come up with strongly expressive text. On the other hand, the AI generative literature was exhausting to deal with and required unnecessary effort to find certain words, and in some cases they were not there. Perhaps in the future, the process of generating text could become more practical and easier to deal with. Overall, It is no wonder why the cut-ups Technique got a wide spread in many different fields in multimedia.
References:
http://www.pcp-net.org/journal/pctp09/frances09.pdf
The Future of The Novel, Multimedia From Wagner to Virtual Reality
