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

2. 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

3. 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

4. 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)

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

6. 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

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

8. 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:

9. 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

10. 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

11. 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).”

12. A human author

13. A human author

14. A human author…

15. 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?