The Cut-up technique was pioneered by the Dadaists in the 1920s and involves rearranging the structure of a piece of text by cutting it up into strips and then reordering it at random into a new text.
The artist Brion Gysin and writer William S. Burroughs developed the cut up technique further by combining printed media and audio recordings in order to discover what they considered to be the true meaning of a given text. In many instances an unedited cut-up would emerge as coherent and meaningful prose, as can be seen within Brion Gysin book ‘Minutes to Go’.
The author has previously found that a variant of the cut-up technique, whereby one writes about an intended piece of architecture from the perspective of a potential building user and then cuts them up and reorders them, can result in a creative leap. During both years of the author’s post graduate architectural training he used such a technique to develop and iterate his projects to great success.
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Cut-up technique, Dadaists, 1920’s
1 April 2014
The Cut-up technique was pioneered by the Dadaists in the 1920s and involves rearranging the structure of a piece of text by cutting it up into strips and then reordering it at random into a new text.
The artist Brion Gysin and writer William S. Burroughs developed the cut up technique further by combining printed media and audio recordings in order to discover what they considered to be the true meaning of a given text. In many instances an unedited cut-up would emerge as coherent and meaningful prose, as can be seen within Brion Gysin book ‘Minutes to Go’.
The author has previously found that a variant of the cut-up technique, whereby one writes about an intended piece of architecture from the perspective of a potential building user and then cuts them up and reorders them, can result in a creative leap. During both years of the author’s post graduate architectural training he used such a technique to develop and iterate his projects to great success.