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Cut-up technique

The cut-up technique, also known as fishbowling, is an aleatory literary technique or genre in which a text is cut up at random and rearranged to create a new text.


The cut-up and the closely associated fold-in techniques are literary writing styles that try to break the linearity of common literature. They are designed to be used with common typewriters.

  • Cut-up is performed by taking a finished and fully linear text (printed on paper) 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 rearranging of work often results in surprisingly innovative new phrases. A common way is to cut a sheet in four rectangular sections, rearranging them and then typing down the mingled prose while compensating for the haphazard word breaks by improvising and innovating along the way.
  • Fold-in is the technique of taking two different sheets of linear text (with the same linespacing), cutting each sheet in half and combining with the other, then reading across the resulting page. The resulting text is often a blend of the two themes, somewhat hard to read.



Gil J. Wolman developed cut-up techniques as part of his lettrist practice. Also in the 1950s painter and writer Brion Gysin more fully developed the cut-up method after accidentally 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. He began deliberately cutting newspaper articles into sections, which he randomly rearranged. 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. Argentine writer Julio Cortazar often used this technique in his book Hopscotch.


Burroughs has cited earlier works as proto-cut-ups: T. S. Eliot's long poem, The Waste Land, and portions of John Dos Passos' works. In 1977, Burroughs and Gysin published The Third Mind, a collection of cut-up writings and essays on the form.

Musical influence and similarities

From at least the early 1970s, David Bowie has used cut-ups to create some of his lyrics. It is a technique which came to influence Kurt Cobain's songwriting.

Other musicians working in sample-based music genres, such as hip hop and electronic music, employ a similar technique. DJs may spend hours in record stores looking ("digging") for LP records featuring obscure or interesting breaks, vocals, and other fragments to meld together in new compositions. Musique concrète had introduced such techniques — cutting, re-arranging and re-editing sounds — much earlier in a musical (as opposed to literary) context.

Jeff Noon uses a similar remixing technique in his writing based on the practices prevalent in Dub music. He expanded upon his remixing with his Cobralingus system, which breaks down a piece of writing, going as far as turning individual words into anagrams, then melding the results into a narrative.

And to return to Tzara's Dadaist example, 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.

In the film Downtown 81, the band Tuxedomoon can be seen performing using a similar method of reading phrases from cut-up papers.

An online subculture of bastard pop resembles the fold-in technique by for example taking instrumentals from one artist and combining it with the vocals of another artist.

Burroughs taught cut-up technique to Genesis P-Orridge in 1971 as a method for "altering reality". Burroughs' explanation was that everything is recorded, and if it is recorded, then it can be edited (P-Orridge, 2003). P-Orridge has long employed cut-ups as an applied philosophy, a way of creating art and music, and of conducting one's life.

American band Interpol uses a similar technique in their video for the song The Heinrich Maneuver. In the video you see a woman who walks in slow-motion until she is hit by a bus and around her you see a handful of people who watches as it happens but in different time zones. A good example of this is a man running from behind trying to warn the woman then stopping once he sees that she's hit and all the while the woman on the picture is only half-ways.

Email cut-ups

A recent phenomenon is an e-mail spam tactic in which randomly-generated text passages are used to thwart Bayesian filters. For example,

The first question of course was, how to get dry again: they me as I walked, the remembrance of my churlishness and that I must confidence between himself and Mrs. Micawber. After which, he for his dagger till his hand gripped it. Then he spoke. I kissed her, and my baby brother, and was very sorry then; but not

Even grammatically consistent sentences can be formed, such as

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.

Such text is called spamoetry (spam poetry) or spam art. Since the text is often derived from actual books, this is effectively a cut-up method.

"Travesty" generators

A class of programs called "travesty generators" exist to perform similar cut-up techniques on user-supplied text. Many such programs exist as web-based applications (see External Links).

Behavioural cut-ups

Recipes For Disaster by the anarchist collective CrimethInc. features a recipe entitled "behavioural cut-ups". This recipe is a method of changing one's life by performing activities which are perceived as (at a basic level) cutting up two socially acceptable, routine behaviours and attaching them to form a creative, amusing activity. It is intended that the practitioner perform one or a series of cut-ups for a long amount of time, until it becomes second nature and the practitioner's behaviour is significantly altered. In the basic behavioural cut-up, the practitioner consults a list of things he or she does every day, and a list of things that that he or she finds frightening, and apply the cut-up technique to both lists. For example, the text suggests: "Public Transportation and Public Speaking." The user is supposed to become used to making speeches on the subway or bus. Another suggestion is using a toaster as a prop while performing odd behavior, such as giving the toaster a face and personality, talking to it, and keeping it on one's person at all times.

References in popular culture

The roleplaying game Over The Edge has a surreal "reality-resistance" group called the Cut-Ups Project that opposes the forces of Control Addiction with the power of "Funkiness".

In the graphic novel Watchmen, Ozymandias watches rows upon rows of televisions, each set to a different channel, to "[allow] subliminal hints of the future to leak through."


See also

External links


Cut-Up Programs

Online Cut-Up Tools

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