SUBMISSIONS OPEN: JANUARY 21ST – JANUARY 31ST

“You see, life is a cut-up, every time you walk down the street or look out the window, your consciousness is caught by random factors and then you begin to realise they’re not so random. That this is saying something to you.”
- William S. Burroughs

Collaging, juxtaposing, splicing together happens every day, whether you are conscious of it or not. Your soul acts as the master artist, your mind and body the tools it uses to violently glue together existence. Have you ever stepped outside and noticed how what you're thinking and what you're seeing colourfully contrast one another? Colliding to create one great mishmash masterpiece: motifs and patterns and the smallest of sensory experiences that can bring back floods of vivid memories. You'll realise it's all connected by some grand and invisible cobweb, and all you had to do was pay attention to it, to notice the gentle vibrations of the limitless net. 

In the decrepit corners of the Beat Hotel, where Burroughs and his artist friend Brion Gysin sunk their eyelids into the flashing lights of the great big Dreamachine, the two began to take note of such mystifying coincidences. The story goes that Gysin was cutting out images atop a bed of newspaper when his attention was caught by the slices of sentences which began forming in the margins of the text. Just a few doors down, Burroughs was working on his breakthrough novel 'Naked Lunch', and soon he would begin to apply Gysin's discovery to his own words. The pair took scissors to anything they could dissect, slicing novels and pictures and film reels and rearranging the jigsaw pieces to create an entirely new artwork.

In these experiments, they found their new-found approach was limitless. Burroughs would take a page of his novel, fold it in half and read them both individually. He began discovering new meanings within his own writing, dissecting pages into threes or fours and rearranging the sections until the jumbled words joined together to create something surprising. He would even cut out individual words or passages, place them in a bag, shake it up and take the pieces out one by one to see what they were telling him. Gysin's advice on using the method was to "Do it for yourself. Use any system which suggests itself to you".

There's freedom in a pair of scissors. Burroughs believed our human bodies are controlled by greedy urges for sex, drugs and power whereas language controls the mind: words and images locking us in conventional ways of interacting with the world around us. The cut-up is a way of noticing these shackles, like raindrops on a boundless cobweb - and thus freeing oneself from them, an alteration of consciousness that occurs in both the writer and the reader of the text. Coincidence can unravel a web of reality, all you have to do is slice into the present.

Areas of interest: 
The Cut-Up Machine (although I recommend physically enacting the cut-up method)
John Walters interviews William S. Burroughs
The Cut Up Method of Brion Gysin by William S. Burroughs