Cut-Up Table
Version 13 · Whole words
Six ways to cut, after Brion Gysin and William S. Burroughs: vertical strips, the fold-in, the grid, three columns, Gysin's permutations, and tape splices. Texts are typed to a fixed page, cut where the blade falls, laid out at hazard and read straight across.
I Ching
DeKorne’s Gnostic Book of Changes: import and manage
- On DeKorne’s download page, download the Word version (.docx). Or open hexagram pages on his site and save them from your browser as web pages (.htm).
- Choose the file or files here. The book is split into its 64 hexagrams and kept in this browser. Nothing is uploaded.
Handling
Output
Read across
Click lines to mark the ones that hold. Seams join exactly where the pieces meet, so fragments fuse into new words.
Working copy
Burroughs edited, deleted and rearranged after every cut. Build the keeper text here.
The methods
- Strips
- Each page is cut into 3, 4, 5, 6 or 8 vertical strips at fixed character columns. All strips from both pages are shuffled and laid side by side. Cross the middle adds the horizontal cut of the quartered page.
- Fold-in
- Each page is folded down the middle and laid on the other, so you read half of one across into half of the other. Nothing is shuffled.
- Grid
- Each page is cut into squares, columns by rows. Squares from both pages are dealt into the rows at random, so a square can change height on the page as well as position.
- Three columns
- Three texts typed into parallel newspaper columns and read straight across the gutters, uncut.
- Permutation
- Gysin's permutation poems: one phrase, its words rearranged into a new order on every line.
- Tape
- Two recordings, each cut into 4 to 512 splices. End to end shuffles all the splices into one tape; Layered shuffles each tape on its own track and plays both together. Either tape can be white or pink noise instead of a recording. Save tape writes the result as a WAV file; on the published page it arrives inside a zip.
- I Ching
- Cast a hexagram with three coins or yarrow stalks and drop its text into a page to cut against your own. Changing lines lead to a relating hexagram. The text comes from James DeKorne’s Gnostic Book of Changes, imported from the copy you download from his site; it stays in this browser.
- Whole words only
- A master switch for Strips, Fold-in and Grid. Every cut moves to the nearest gap between words, so no word is split; strips come out ragged where the words fall. Off, the blade cuts straight through words, as scissors do.
- Vertical slip
- Strips laid on a table don't stay level. Each piece may ride a few lines high or low, which changes every line it crosses.
- Newsprint type
- Proportional, justified type. A straight cut falls at a different letter on every line, so strips come out much more ragged than typescript.
- Pair pages
- For texts longer than a page. Fold page 1 into page 100: offset B so distant pages meet. With Page B empty, Page A is cut against a second copy of itself.