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About the Cut-up Technique Generator

Bob Ross and Brian Eno are to blame for my fascination with creating inspirational sparks from randomness. Their ideas about happy accidents and oblique strategies have helped shape how I make things.

I'm a fan of harnessing randomness to create inspirational sparks for creative pursuits. I've previously made a random word generator specifically designed for creative purposes. I love making art and I love making tools that help inspire people which consequentially has led to me making this cut-up writing tool.

How This All Started

I had heard about the cut-up technique a while ago and I recently saw an old clip on YouTube of David Bowie talking about using a custom digital cut-up tool to help him write song lyrics.

This got me thinking that I should make my own as the idea seemed very intriguing to me.

While making this tool, I found an online version of the tool David Bowie used. It's called the Verbasizer if you want to check it out. It definitely helped to inspire the making of this tool.

The very first digital cut-up tool seems to have created for Brion Gysin but I can't remember where I read that so instead go check out this great article on Cut-Ups and Brion Gysin.

Brion Gysin is the pioneer for this writing technique.

The Features of this Cut-Up Writing Generator

Once I figured out that I wanted to make this tool, the next step was figuring out how I could make some small improvements to the current features of most online cut-up generators.

This came down to two small improvements in my analysis.

1. You can load source text from news stories or bits of public domain fiction. This is a great quick way for people to start. It also makes it very easy to use on mobile phones.
2. The cut-up text is formatted in a more scannable and usable way. Most of the tools just deliver a singular block of remixed text which is very hard to read through so I decided to deliver the results in 4 line stanzas. This allows the user to find resonant bits of text much faster and easier. You can still choose to get the remixed text in a monolithic block - if that's what you're into.

That's about all there is to say.

Go use the Cut-Up Technique Generator and start creating things. Good luck!