Burroughs, Cut-ups, Mash-ups, and so forth LCC 2700: Intro to Computational Media Fall 2005 Ian Bogost

William S. Burroughs Adding machine industry heir — lived off trust funds Associated with the Beat Generation and other “countercultures” His novel Naked Lunch led to changes in obscenity laws

Dada An avant garde arts movement of the early 20th c Disgust with the war (WW1) and its cultural preconditions Public gatherings, demonstrations, art/politics/culture Tristan Tzara, one of the foundational figures in Dada (an arts movement of the early 20th c.) Created a poem by pulling words out of a hat

Cut-ups Cut-ups: a text is cut-up at random and rearranged to create a new one 1950s, Byron Gysin developed a more detailed version: sliced layers of a newspaper (with pages below offering interesting juxtaposition) Gysin introduced Burroughs to the technique The writer’s version of the collage, or the motion/still camera (the accidents of photography)

The Value of Cut-Ups Populist: Cut-Ups are for everyone Experimental Gives new meaning to old works

All Writing is Cut-Ups “A collage of words read and overheard” “Proto cut-ups” T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land” Burroughs’s explicit tie to von Neumann: game theory and strategy as cut-up

Remix Rearrange the musical experience through audio editing As early as 1970s (David Bowie) Sample-based genres: hip-hop, electronic DJs as authors

Mashup Combining the parts of more than one source (song) Bootlegs, Bastard Pop, Blends, etc. Web mashups: using open APIs like Google or Amazon to create new applications Information separate from presentation Focus on existing code, not new code Examples: http://www.aytozon.com/ http://www.housingmaps.com/

Procedurality and Cut-ups A focus on the rules of interaction Procedurality, not randomness or recombinance (often another name for randomness) For human or computer authors

A computer author… (conceptual blending) her tale began when she was infected with smugnessloveitis. she began her days looking in the mirror at her own itchy entitled face. her failure was ignoring her tormented angel nature. life was an astounding miracle. nordic-beauty death-figure vapor steamed from her pores when she rode her bicycle. that was nothing lovely. when 21 she was a homely woman. she decided to persevere; in the rain, she fears only epidermis imperialists. she believes that evil pride devours and alternates with pride of hope. it was no laughing matter. she snuggles in angel skin sheets and sleeps. inside she was resolved to never find a smug or paranoid love. D. Fox Harrell

But… is it readable? “This poem is a commentary on racial politics and the lim- itations of simplistic binary views of social identity. The dynamic nature of social identity is also reflected in the way the program produces different poems with different novel metaphors each time it is run (though reading a large num- ber of these could be tiresome).”

A human author

A human author

A human author…

Operationalizing cultural rules… What behaviors are at work? How do they interact? What cultural structures and conditions underlie these behaviors? When we cut them up, how should we recombine them, and why?