T
he stir frys are related to cut ups. The sorts of examples of previous
cut ups I'm aware of range from the textual and audio cut ups done by William
S Burroughs to the sorts of experiments by Dali to more recent experiments
by, say, the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets, to more visually oriented cut ups done
by some of the Web artists such as Reiner Strasser and Ted Warnell and
others. Then there's the totally automatic text dicing machines by Lee
Worden and a few others. I'm skipping lots of work here, obviously--such
work is proliferating (and part of what I want to get at here is why it
is proliferating). The common thread among these works is the way that
textual or visual materials are quite literally cut up into pieces and
then rearranged, partly at random and partly according to either the artist's
associativity and/or the associativity the artist gives into the hands
of the reader/viewer to rearrange and recombine the materials.
What's New?
What can be new about this? Well, when Burroughs
wrote/made Naked Lunch and his trilogy of cut up novels, it was taken rightfully
as something startlingly new despite Dali's having done something of the
same thing. Burroughs did it on the level of chunks of text whereas Dali
did it with individual words or just simply smaller units and in a much
less ambitious way, ie, no novels and Dali probably didn't produce the
interesting body of theoretical, speculative writings about his cut ups
that Burroughs did. Burroughs created a whole world view from his cut ups
and related writings. But Burroughs and his partner in crime, Brion Gysin,
did acknowledge the part that the painters played in their experiments,
saying that they were simply applying a technique that had been practiced
for some time in the visual arts.
If we acknowledge that our ideas are drawn not always
from a blank tablet but are instead indebted to the work of those whom
we have read and heard and seen, we see that much of what we do, however
original, is cut together from the work of others. More generally, the
language we use is gotten not from a blank tablet but from what has gone
before. So there is a sense in which even this sort of writing is a cut
up or cut together.
What's new in the stir frys is the spastic interactivity
they give to the reader/viewer, the way that they insist on hanging together
as texts, physically, anyway and, if they are successful as texts, rather
than simply as langwidgetical text toys, the range of insights they afford
into themselves and the random and the cut up and the Web and into oneself,
since the stir frys allow you to make your own texts.
Hyperlinks and Cut Ups
It seems to me that there are a couple of things
about the Web that naturally go with cut ups. The hyper link itself is
wonderfully diverse in its associativity. The way that we end up going
from text to text via hyper links makes for a cut up of sorts, cut ups
not on the level of the word, as in Dali, or the chunk, as in Burroughs,
but on a larger scale, link to link, text to text. The memory of surfing
the Web, recalled later, is often of an intoxicating blur of diversely
associative texts strung together by our own and the individual authors'
associativity via the provided links.
In fact the stir frys can be thought of as a certain
sort of hyperlink structure or mapping from one text to another. Each individual
text can be considered as a set of elements and the stir frys establish
a one-to-one mapping between the elements of the various texts. But rather
than the usual situation, where linking replaces the entire screen, mousing
over stir fry text replaces only a part of the text and the body of the
new text moves as an entity to adjust itself to the change, providing the
pleasant illusion that it has some sort of unified character or personality
even in its transformations. They want to stay unified. This behavior or
character is one of the things I like best about the stir frys. It ain't
entirely gimmick: one of the things you'd like in a cut up is meaningful
association, not just widely combinatorial permutation. The stir frys really
try to keep it together, however much they are doomed to be scrambled and
somewhat addled texts.
I was going to say that another thing about the Web
that naturally goes with the cut up, besides the hyper link, is the interactivity.
But maybe interactivity is just the result of hyper links? No, that's not
true: email or other text input is not just hyper links, and audio interaction
is not just hyper links, though maybe all interactivity is architecturally
a hyper link or vector between parties.
In any case, driving a computer as a reader/speaker/chatter/correspondent/etc
is an active thing, and one is presented with all sorts of choices along
the way be they via the hyper link or other interaction, not the least
of which is the interaction that happens just in the way we read and think
and choose even when we're reading a plain old book. But the question I'm
trying to figure out is why the cut up feels totally at home on the screen,
on the Web, I'm trying to understand why that literary heritage of the
cut up has been richly congruent with the spirit of a lot of contemporary
Web art.
Mechanical Process and Writing
I went to hear Marvin Minsky, the great artificial
intelligencer, speak many years ago in Victoria BC. At one point he said
he felt that the main thing the computer has contributed to knowledge is
deeper understanding of process, of processes.
All of the variations on the cut up method have some
mechanical process involved in them.
Of course, computers are processing machines, they
are process machines, a phrase that has some redundancy in it, since machines
inevitably automate some process or processes.
It's this mechanical dimension of cut ups that suit
them so well to new media.
There are many 'process centered writing techniques'
that share this property with cut ups. Certainly the appeal of Burroughs's
writing, the atmospheres and their association with the cut up, has served
to make the cut up, in all its variations, widespread. But it also has
to do with the ease and flexibility with which the method can be automated
and the process not illustrated but engaged.
I've thought of making a program that allows people
to make their own stir frys. But it is not altogether a mechanical process
to make an engaging stir fry: you have to pick texts that collide and interpenetrate
in an interesting and hopefully startling and even enlightening way, and
you have to choose how to cut each of the texts into pieces and those decisions
should be based on seeing the results and then being able to edit again.
A lot of work to make a program that would permit subtle makings, which
is why I haven't made it.
Inner and Outer Process
Before I started working in radio, I didn't appreciate
the value of the random and semi-mindless experimentation in writing or
art more generally. But as I began to experiment with sound and cutting
tape up and randomly reassembling it and then not so randomly but still
there was randomness, etc., I was delighted to find how stuff arises just
via the doing and semi-mindless experimentation. Stuff arises and then
you can shape it or not as you please, as you start to appreciate the nature
of the stuff arising, start to understand something about the processes
and the materials. So you end up not constraining them utterly and strictly
determine what results, not that much shaping, but throw the right wrenches
into the works at key points.
Might it be that dreams happen this way too? You know
the feeling in a vivid dream that you really aren't choosing what's happening,
though you may choose how you react to what's happening? The conventional
idea is that we really are choosing what's happening at some deep, denied
or simply hidden intentional level. But maybe we aren't choosing what's
happening; maybe stuff is arising through the same semi-mindless process
of experimentation, the same putting of building blocks together via a
process that doesn't so much involve choice of how the blocks go together
as just putting them together without choice but nonetheless according
to a process or two.
Then to have a feel for the processes and the building
blocks, the materials and the process.
I've been thinking about the way that stuff just arises
and the process of working with and generating that stuff for awhile. The
notion that at the most fundamental or formative level, we do not choose
what happens in dreams—I mean that there are mental processes that function
without any conscious choice whatever like blood pumps without our choosing
it—and that in our experimentations we are both kind of duplicating those
processes externally in the way we set up the external processes that generate
stuff and also allowing the mindless generative processes within ourselves
their potent place in our response to these external processes... this
interests me. I mean on the one hand, there are the two mindless types
of processes: the ones inside us and the ones we implement in the things
we make, particularly when it comes to making little langwidgets. Then
there are the mindful processes. The ones in us and the way we zap those
into the langwidgets. Additionally, there are the mindful and mindless
processes of the reader.... into and out of the primal and the mindless
and the (pseudo) random and the mindful...
Cut Ups/Cut Togethers
One of the stir frys, Correspondence, draws from
some email correspondence between myself and Mary Phillips and Lee Worden
about the cut up and, more generally, into matters of language. I wanted
to do at least one cut up involving our email because we're working together
on a project about the cut up or centered around it--who knows how it will
turn out--but also because the correspondences of email, that interaction,
that creating together, involves a weaving together of our thoughts and
words for which the cut up is a kind of metaphor. Both Mary and myself
and Lee shared in email a sense that there was something about the cut
up that we couldn't quite put our finger on, that was eluding us but was
compelling and beyond us.
Certainly there's a sense of introducing the unknown
when working with the cut up. And this sense of introducing the unknown
has an exciting synchronistic aspect to it and dovetails with the synchronicities
of correspondence and communication over the vasting sprawl of the Web
and its virtual imaginary wonders. Correspondence was also a tribute to
my friends' writing and our involvement together in this seeking together
of insight about the cut up and language and art. It occurs to me that
hyper links establish a certain correspondence between two texts or perhaps
two people or x and y.
Collaborative Architextures
Also, this project we're working on together is
one of the first projects for webartery.com, which ideally will flower
into a magnificent collaborative site between many Web artists around the
world, so there was desire on my part to create something collaborative
to share not just with Mary and Lee but with the rest of the artists on
the webartery project.
Each in our different houses variously around the
globe connected via the conduits and architectures of communications. Creating
together these word structures that themselves have architectures.
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