Thursday, February 21, 2013

Cut-up technique writing, aka automatic writing

The cut-up technique is an aleatory (random) literary technique in which a text is cut up and rearranged to create a new text.
The concept can be traced to at least the Dadaists of the 1920s, but was popularized in the late 1950s and early 1960s by writer William S. Burroughs.

Cut-up is performed by taking a finished and fully linear text and cutting it in pieces with a few or single words on each piece. The resulting pieces are then rearranged into a new text.

Fold-in is the technique of taking two sheets of linear text (with the same linespacing), folding each sheet in half vertically and combining with the other, then reading across the resulting page.

A precedent of the technique occurred during a Dadaist rally in the 1920s in which Tristan Tzara offered to create a poem on the spot by pulling words at random from a hat. Collage, which was popularized roughly contemporaneously with the Surrealist movement, sometimes incorporated texts such as newspapers or brochures.

Burroughs suggested cut-ups may be effective as a form of divination saying, "When you cut into the present the future leaks out."

The I Ching, also known as the Book of Changes, is one of the oldest of the Chinese classic texts.[1]

The book contains a divination system comparable to Western geomancy or the West African Ifá system; in Western cultures and modern East Asia, it is still widely used for this purpose, says Wikipedia.

The text of the I Ching is a set of oracular statements represented by 64 sets of six lines each called hexagrams.
The oldest method for casting the hexagrams, the yarrow stalk method, was gradually replaced during the Han Dynasty by the three coins method.

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