Cut-up is an old technique. Tristan Tzara did a version of it in the 1920s. Brion Gysin and William Burroughs developed the modern form in the late 1950s, cutting newspapers and rearranging the fragments to surface what the prose was doing underneath its sentences.
The point was that mass print had become the ambient texture of a life, and cutting it open was a way to see what the texture was made of, what phrases recurred, what assumptions sat below the surface, what the language wanted you to think before you’d thought it.
The ambient texture has changed. We spend hours in chat conversations with language models. That’s the new newspaper.
These cut-ups take the machine’s side of a conversation as source material. I’m not generating with an LLM and calling it art. I’m cutting one, the way you’d cut anything else that constituted the linguistic atmosphere of a moment. The source here is conversation with a language model. Specifically, Claude’s side of a single conversation, never mine. I cut and arrange; the words on the page come from the machine’s half of an exchange I was part of.
What’s on the page is what the cut produced.
Wikipedia link below for a history of the cut-up.