Programmatic cut-ups

Reorganizing some long-lost demos of mine, I found my programmatic nod to William S. Burroughs’ cut-up technique. While I recall I was originally going to allow users to input text into the demo, I never got around to it. Here’s the demo, with the sample text as my entry on “fascist word processors”.

It’s obviously not perfect (the amount of parenthesis really messes up this sample), but it still sort of works. The script scans through the text, and at each pre-set punctuation mark, it “flips a coin” to determine whether or not to chop there or continue on. As the fragment gets longer, the probability to chop increases.

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• May 27, 2010 at 12:26
  in Writing and all that follows

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