Cut-up refers to the idea of taking a piece of linear text printed on paper, cutting into pieces and re-arranging the result into a new text. It’s related to the Fold-in technique where two pieces of text are cut in half and combined to create a new text. Both techniques involve randomising an existing piece of media - the output can be hard to read, but the results can often be striking, revealing a new and unexpected narrative.
The approach has a long tradition in literature that stretches back to the 1920’s surrealists, where Tristan Tzara offered to create a poem by pulling words out of a hat. Most notably, the Beat painter and writer Bryon Gysin started to use the technique in the 1950s and introduced it to William Burroughs. Burroughs and Gysin experimented extensively with the technique using it on both printed media and audio recordings. They suggested that cut-ups could be used to discover implicit meanings in the original content - in effect using it as a form of divination.
Cut-ups have been particularly prevalent in post-war avant-garde music. Pierre Schaeffer’s early musique concrète work with tape recorders and “found sound” in the 1940s and 1950s introduced the notion of cutting and re-arranging disparate elements into a composition. Since then numerous composers and performers have developed techniques that attempt to break with linear forms - from Stockhausens’s use of graphical scores to the free-wheeling improvisation of Derek Bailey.
This approach has filtered down to the mainstream, as much sample-based music can be regarded as a form of cut-up. Many DJs spend hours sourcing obscure records, mining them for fragments that can be re-arranged to form a new composition.
This site applies the cut-up technique to an internet search engine. The user enters a base word of phrase and a web page is assembled from the content of the web pages returned by a search engine. Up to 10 web pages are used in the composition of each result - the structure and order is determined by a random engine.
The results returned by the cut-up engine will be different with each use. As with any random assemblage the results can be unreadable and worthless, but with repeated attempts some surprising and intriguing patterns can emerge.
This site is, of course, a copyright violation nightmare. Please don’t sue - I’m skint.
It’s based on the Google SOAP Search API, which has been deprecated in favour of the less appropriate AJAX API. It still works for now, though is limited to 1000 searches a day.