Text Manipulation & Cut-up Technique Links

• The Text Mixing Desk
• A Brief Explanation of the Cut-up Technique

There are a lot of websites out there covering the Cut-up technique, especially with reference to William S. Burroughs and Brion Gysin. There are also a reasonable number of Cut-up engines and scripts, although some (for example, the one hosted by the now defunct NetMonkey online magazine, and Lee Worden’s Cut-up engine & website) have now sadly disappeared from the internet.

Online and Downloadable Cut-up Scripts

• Language is a Virus
  More Cut-up generators, text manipulators and Burroughs-inspired articles than you can shake a stick at.
• DadaDodo
  DadaDodo is a program that analyses texts for word probabilities, and then generates random sentences based on that. The ANSI C source code is provided.
• When you run out of words
  The OutOfWords application creates new texts from a source text. The resulting text consists of “likely” words pairs from the source text.
• Generating Random Text
  Takes a block of text as input and works out the proportion of characters within the text according to a chosen order. Technically, this process is based on Markov chains.
• runme.org - say it with software art!
  A whole page of downloadable text manipulation software (mainly for Microsoft Windows).
• Bot 002
  Bot 002 makes cut-ups from texts it fetches randomly on the web. It gets its URLs from the Yahoo database. It has a 10,000 word database to work with that evolves with what it is fed (instructions in both English and French).
• Non-Linear Adding Machine
  Tom’s Cut-up engine - mixes different texts together as well as cutting them up.
• Cut’n’Mix Info: Cut-up software engine
  Downloadable Microsoft Windows Cut-up engine with interesting selection. of filter algorithms
• A Burroughs-esque Cutups Engine
  Ben Collar’s Cut-up engine source files (GPL - written in Python).

Text Manipulation and Cut-up Information & Theory

• Can’t we writers have some fun as well?
  Article written in 2001 by author Jeff Noon for The Guardian: Film-makers use jump cuts, freeze frames, slow motion. Musicians remix, scratch, sample. Can’t we writers have some fun as well?
• WSB: the Cut-up Technique
  A detailed introduction of Cut-up from bigtable.com, a defunct William Burroughs site now only available on archive.org.
• William S. Burroughs and Cut-up
  Introduction to Burroughs-style cut-up from Legends magazine.
• Beat Godfather Meets Glitter Main Man
  William Burroughs’ 1974 interview with David Bowie - some interesting discussion of Cut-ups.

Computer-Generated Writing information & scripts, and other miscellaneous related resources

• computer-generated writing - a million idiot monkeys make a fine shakespeare.
  Huge list of links about computer generated writing.
• The Shannonizer: Notes on Computer-Generated Text
  Interesting theories about producing scripts to create computer generated writing. See also below.
• The Shannonizer: a Web Toy with Delusions of Literacy
  Putting the Shannonizer theory into practice - a great online script, highly recommended.