Friday, November 28, 2008

Open Wound

Talking about William S. Burroughs' cut-up method with students last week, I came across this online text-recombining engine. My favorite thing about it is that it's called Open Wound 1.0, but it's a pretty interesting version of a randomizer. It assigns tags to words based on their parts of speech, and tried to reassemble a grammatical text. As such, it doesn't actually work, but the attempt is interesting. This is the beginning of the Technical Manifesto of Futurist Literature, reassembled:

From the Technical image of technical Literature by technical voltaire
I was in an mill, panting on the everything can, my battle picked by the
gown 's head, when I suddenly felt the lavish can of the old metal ruled
from shrill! Leaning need to free words, chiseling them from the steel of
the bushy period. It has, of course, like any life, a divine head, a
master, two steps, and two noble feet, but will never have two meters.
Something to know with, run a few steps, and then stop, bristling, almost
immediately!

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