cut-up

This is a digital embezzlement of Bruno Schulz’s short story “Sierpień” (“August”). Some of the nouns have been cut out of Schulz’s text and randomly replaced with words taken from the book Polski Fiat 125p. Budowa. Eksploatacja. Naprawa (“Polish Fiat 125p: Construction, Use, Repair”). (source: ELO 2015 catalog)

“Locutions introuvables” is a literary program inspired by Marcel Bénabou’s Ouilipien method published in The Oulipien Library N.25 in 1984. This program was presented in the “Les Immatériaux” exposition of the Centre Pompidou in 1985, but it was Éric Joncquel who ported it to the website ALAMO (l’Atelier de Littérature Assistée par la Mathématique et les Ordinateurs). The program is also inspired by the notion of “langage cuit” (over-done language) by Robert Desnos. Entitled “Quinze locutions introuvables, mais qui doivent enrichir notre sagesse” (15 lost expressions, but that ought to enrich our wisdom), this program takes one hundred and forty expressions and cuts them up into two parts and recombines them in order to form original expressions. Thus, the “head” and the “tail” of the expressions are mixed up to create lexical chimera. The program works by composing expressions randomly. That is to say, the creation of these “lost expressions” is a function of the combination of different elements that provides the reader with the opportunity of interpreting the text, or rather the scripton, in a personal manner. For example, one of the expressions created by the program is “tirer le diable par le bout du nez.” This expression closely resembles the real expression “tirer le diable par la queue.” Therefore, the resemblance could confuse or trouble the reader, according to the reader’s reaction confronted by an unknown yet familiar expression. In spite of that, this complicity of the program grants the reader a level of liberty in interpreting the expression and giving it an independent sense. The viability of the lost expression does not therefore come from the lexical sense of its elements but rather the sense that the reader creates. Since the lost expressions imitate the structure of true expressions, the reader can use this complicity when reading them. As such, it can be said that the program produces an esthetic of complicity. With more than one hundred and forty expressions cut up and recombined, there are an exponential number of expressions the reader can form by generating them. In this way, the program truly succeeds at enriching the wisdom of the reader by conferring unto him/her original expressions.

(Source: Jonathan Baillehache)

The reader finds, in the first level of reading a letter of Eugenia Vilasans, overlapped with a photography of her. The letter was written in 1926 and stayed hidden until she died, she confesses her adulturey in the letter. After this introduction a link invites to recompose her story, there are disorganised fragments. The image is a metaphor of the hypertext: postcards, newspapers cuts, pages from personal diaries of different dates, letters of the lover conforming the plot. It is an epistolary story that must be assembled like a puzzle.

Text ‘n FX is a DJ mixer for text. It is a prototype machine developed in the 80’s for the emerging practice of Hip-Hop. Instead of a DJ mixing two records together, the designers of the device proposed the idea of a Text-Jockey (TJ). The TJ acted as a machine-assisted poet mashing up lyrics read from two floppy disks in real-time using statistics, Natural Language Processing (NLP) and cut-up techniques from experimental literature. The product never made it to market but it exists today as a media-archaeological curiosity.

(Source: ChercherLeTexte website)

The net exhibition SONNE ORDKLIP [Sonne Wordclip(s)] is divided up ito 14 series', where some are thematic according to the usual rigid encyclopedia principles, while others are more directly related via a single common word-clip. The following, for example: DK [abreviation for Denmark]-CULTURE-SOC, EGO-PSYCH, GO, "LITT", ZOO, WORD, BOO, CHIDREN, CORPSE, OUT, LANGUAGE, ART, FOOD, LYRICAL NATUR. They are texts - or whatever one wants to call them - which, in their insistent overexcited play with the meaning and visuality of language, have no equal in contemporary Danish poetry. We have to go back to the good old dadaists' collages and montages - Kurt Schwitters' for example - to find competitive parallels.

Blue Hyacinth is a stir fry text by Jim Andrews and Pauline Masurel. Masurel wrote the texts. Andrews did the programming and invented the stir fry form. The stir fry form consists of n texts. In Blue Hyacinth, there are four texts (n=4), each of which is a different shade of blue. You can view the text of a given color by clicking the square of that color. Each of the four texts somehow involve the blue hyacinth. Each of the four texts is partitioned into 30 parts. When the reader mouses over (or touches, if on a mobile device) part x of text y, that part is replaced with part x of text y+1. So the four texts begin to form a new text. There are several more stir fry texts and essays about them at vispo.com/StirFryTexts.

This "cut up" poem is told slowly, in small white letters on a black screen. Morten Skogly writes that this is a "cut up" of poems written by him that "writes itself (for the patient)." Phrases appear almost as on a screensaver, creating connections on the screen that almost always make sense despite their random connections. A voice is consistent, an anxious voice: "Don't leave me here", it writes. This is an example of generative poetry.

about nothing, places, memories, and thoughts: robert creeley (1926-2005) and patricia tomaszek in a cut and mixed poem-dialogue

This work leverages the unique potential of digital media to bring together a death-voice (Robert Creeley) and a life-voice (Patricia Tomaszek). Each time the user clicks the mouse, both poets create - reading back and forth - a computer-generated poem that blends surprise and repetition to create a range of unique (dis)harmonies. In total, 98 selected lines from the authors recordings serve as the raw material from which vast a # of 8-10 line poems - the average length of both poets' works - are created. Simple algorithmic rules determine each outcome; a number of openings and closings are pre-selected while the body of each composition is generated computationally via a probabilistic grammar. The work began with a series of response poems, penned by the author, to the poems of Robert Creeley. These poems where then recorded with each line as a separate sound sample. Crucial lines from Creeley that inspired the responsive writing process were then subjected to the same 'cut-up' procedure. The final set of lines, restricted by the availability of Creeley's audio recordings, were selected on the basis of their cohesion with the selected themes: places, memories, thoughts, identity, loss, absence, and nothingness.

Author description: Self Portrait(s) [as Other(s)] is a recombinant portrait and biography generator. The piece recombines the self-portraits of a dozen well-known painters as well as biographical text on each. Accordingly, the generated pictorial and textual portraits are no longer self portraits, but "selves" portraits, with subjects that are more than one. The piece deals with identity in an art-historical context, self-identity for any given artist, and identification as a process. There are over 120,000,000 possible recombinations.