Issue # 2

Cutup

 
 

Cutup Editorial

There is nothing before you but hills, these
are of course only metaphors for the objects
you so violently hide in your pockets.

B is for boundaries: The second issue of Textbase aims to stretch the boundaries of creative writing as a process in the information age. Within the culture of fragments and reconfigured information, cutup functions as a process of production rather than reconfiguration, a process that produces difference rather than a reiteration of the same.

Plenty of faxes he said. The consumer
does pay for con, buy

Media culture presents us with a series of discontinuous images. Video, TV, email and the WWW are fragmentary experiences, supposedly manipulated by the audience in a type of cutup process. Like these mediums, writing is never a complete text, each frame refers to what comes before and after. Each text, is always situated within the boundaries of a context. Each fragment is neither beginning nor end but at an intersection of various surfaces.

an auto-buying fund report.
A few months later, called him again:


Cutup raises the question, how much of the creative process really belongs to the writer? When elements of chance play two guys in a garage. He could collect countries, like China. such a determining role, how can a writer "own" a text? Cutup transforms the voice of the writer from an authoritative voice to a mystical voice, as the text "writes itself" when the writer opens it before the gates of chance. He caused a little damage. He brought hair from her. He brought clouds of mist from me. The writer's position shifts from that of "creator-genius" to the more passive role of editor. Following this, cutup presents a challenge to the contemporary politics of copyright and "owner-ship" of writing.

There will be flow of
information, he predicted.

When utilising cutup, there is an immediacy: the physicality of dissecting matter. This involves an acknowledgement of text as a form of visual communication and of writing as a form of research using textual matter. Physically, writing is an action with an intimate relationship to the world around it, the world of (con)texts within which it orients itself. Cutup produces writing at the intersection of a series of texts; it is a fold that encompasses multiple surfaces and the possibility of multiple worlds.

My eyes eject wide
open while entities
avoid the ever
invisible meanwhile.

Other people's own story is
as the truths.

  

back to Cutup contents