burroughs

Two thoughts occurred to me while reading this article:

Following from the ideas about applications to the digital world mentioned in the introduction, I immediately thought of the project I did last year on Harold Cohen and the concept of computer as artist. The way the introduction discusses chance operations and spontenaeity as determinants of artistic outcome seems to correspond to the way Cohen used his program AARON to come up with original drawings. And I think the person writing the introduction, as well as Burroughs in the article, made a really apt point in discussing the ways that this kind of spontenaeity can reinvigorate a tired artwork/piece of writing. For Cohen, I think putting the spontaneous elements of drawing into the hands of the most logical of chance operators (a computer, which can be programmed to be absolutely random) allowed him to explore completely new ideas of authorship, and the origination of drawing itself.

As I was reading, I was also trying to figure out other applications of the cut up method to visual arts. In poetry or writing, the elements (words, or even letters at a more basic level) are pretty distinct and obvious. In older forms of poetry, too, there are some very clear guidelines or forms that the elements (words, for instance) must fit into. So using the cut up method can already have some restrictions or limits. But with visual art, especially a two dimensional piece, the elements appear to me to be much more complicated. You could take and image, cut it into pieces on a grid, then glue it back together in a different configuration, but I'm pretty sure most people who talk about collage aren't thinking of that method. More likely in my mind (maybe I'm not thinking outside the box enough) is a way of looking at images from a printmakers perspective, where different elements overlap and blend into one another. This, I think, is more how the surrealists thought of their collages, were they had different elements that they randomly scattered on a page and then glued down.

Of course, here we're still being very literal.

I see what Burroughs is saying about film and photography. His applications of the cut up method to these media is very non-literal. What he's really talking about here is juxtaposition, for instance the juxtaposition of two photographs on a roll of film, or two scenes or shots in a movie. It's kind of interesting, cause another one of the ideas I got from this article is the way that a cut up method can democratize the elements of a whole. So you can have a really incoherent sentence produced by taking apart a paragraph and shufflig the words around.. and that sentence is incoherent because the elements are not organized hierarchically in the way a "normal" or "correct" sentence is organized. There's no arrangement of subject-verb-noun, so each word must be taken at face value, and the reader becomes reaquainted with these words thru their new placement next to uncommon matches. Similarly, in terms of images, unusual placement tends to merit reconsideration of something dry.