When you cut into the present, the future leaks out.
William S. Burroughs
seen from Malaysia
seen from United Kingdom
seen from China

seen from Spain

seen from Sweden
seen from United States
seen from China

seen from Malaysia

seen from Malaysia

seen from Malaysia
seen from United States

seen from Malaysia
seen from Germany

seen from Malaysia

seen from United States
seen from United States

seen from Malaysia
seen from China

seen from Dominican Republic
seen from United States
When you cut into the present, the future leaks out.
William S. Burroughs

Anya is live and ready to show you everything. Watch her strip, dance, and perform exclusive shows just for you. Interact in real-time and make your fantasies come true.
Free to watch ⢠No registration required ⢠HD streaming
âWrought distinctly only tapping, some angels door. Madam Nameless-- vainly morrow;-- Presently rustling napping evermore. Forgiveness Lenore-- heart grew door;-- sought nothing Thrilled âTis midnight silken, rare wished stood beating repeating Lenore---â Original Poem: âThe Ravenâ by Edgar Allan Poe. Cut-Up by @silence-singer.
Here is my first cut-up, made from the words of Edgar Allan Poeâs âThe Raven.â It is honestly quite fascinating how though the words are chosen at random they make sense in their own way.
Cut from basic printer paper and pasted into a notebook, photos taken with various lenses on an iPhone and added and finished in Adobe Photoshop.
William S. Burroughs - The Technology and Ethics of Wishing Recorded June 1986, Naropa University This recording and the entire Naropa Collection is licensed...
A very interesting documentary about creative writing by the one and only: William S. Burroughs. I would highly recommend watching it, even if it is a bit lengthy.
The cut-up method developed by William S. Burroughs and Brion Gysin is interesting when we think about the ways that we use social media, even tumblr.Â
Burroughs explained the method:
âThe method is simple. Here is one way to do it. Take a page. Like this page. Now cut down the middle and cross the middle. You have four sections: 1 2 3 4 ... one two three four. Now rearrange the sections placing section four with section one and section two with section three. And you have a new page. Sometimes it says much the same thing. Sometimes something quite different--(cutting up political speeches is an interesting exercise)--in any case you will find that it says something and something quite definite. Take any poet or writer you fancy. Heresay, or poems you have read over many times. The words have lost meaning and life through years of repetition. Now take the poem and type out selected passages. Fill a page with excerpts. Now cut the page. You have a new poem. As many poems as you like.â
Current artists use the technique as well:
âCut-ups establish new connections between images," Foisy said, reading from a cut-up of Burroughs' and her own thoughts on the practice. "Screenshots from films are cut-ups. Films themselves are cut-ups. Writing itself is a cut-up. Thought forms are cut-ups. Memories are cut-ups." Once you think in terms of cut-ups, nearly everything appears as one.
--âThe Power of Cutting Up Your Idols, and Everything Elseâ by Gabby Bess.Â
My intention is to research as use the technique as a way of 1.) Overcoming artist block and 2.) Connecting my work with the work of those I admire to see what happens and 3.) Exploring ideas of creativity and originality and inspiration. The cut-up technique seems a good way to do this.
Xenopoem
N. Casio Poe writes, âAll those fucking dead babies experience a crisis in their understanding of the real.â This visceral declaration signals a destabilization of the boundaries between internal and external realities, akin to cellular systems experiencing apoptosisâprogrammed deathâto preserve systemic integrity. Yet, as in biology, these crises generate feedback loops that catalyze emergent properties. The "crisis in understanding" aligns with systems biologyâs emphasis on perturbation as a site of transformation. In Poeâs text, lingering on details of the grotesque becomes an act of "realism creeping in," an invasive force mirroring how molecular disruptions can proliferate chaos or lead to novel equilibria. The âwounded and open human bodyââa recurring motifâserves as the nexus where narratives of isolation, alienation, and exploitation converge. Poeâs observation that these wounds were âwrongly relied on⌠to seal my alienationâ evokes the self-referential loops in biological systems, where overcompensation or misregulation exacerbates damage. Just as a malfunctioning immune response can turn against the host, Poeâs characters weaponize their traumas to "control others" and "contain emotions to a damaging degree." Poeâs prioritization of âatmosphere, mood, and imagery over narrativeâ reflects systems biologyâs rejection of reductionist paradigms. The accumulation of "little moments and sights and ideas" mirrors the integrative nature of biological networks, where meaning emerges not from isolated components but from their interactions. The âunbelievable unrealityâ he describes is thus a product of dynamic layering, a "believable unreality" akin to the systems-level coherence of life forms under stress. This interplay of substance and style grounds Poeâs "beautiful wreckage" in the material realities of "economic and environmental disaster." Systems biology teaches us that organisms respond to external perturbations with internal reorganizations; similarly, Poeâs prose navigates the chaos of "cruel exploitation" and "annihilation" by constructing adaptive frameworksâfantasies that "break down" under prolonged scrutiny but also give rise to new possibilities for resilience. Poeâs assertion that âtrust is a disappointing thing, but sometimes you have to shut the fuck up and surrender to the thing that made you who you areâ can be interpreted as a call to embrace oneâs embeddedness within systems. The "surrender" Poe describes is an alignment with the self-regulating processes that define lifeâa relinquishment of control that paradoxically fosters adaptation. The sexual charge embedded in Poeâs language reflects the bioenergetic principles underlying system interactions. Energy transferâwhether through metabolic pathways or interpersonal exchangesâdrives the emergence of complexity. Poeâs text harnesses this energy, transforming visceral horror into a generative force. As he states, âIf the world wonât understand you, you can make it disappear,â signaling an ontological reconfiguration where systems reset themselves to escape terminal feedback loops.
An Essay

Anya is live and ready to show you everything. Watch her strip, dance, and perform exclusive shows just for you. Interact in real-time and make your fantasies come true.
Free to watch ⢠No registration required ⢠HD streaming
Corduroy Institute is pleased to announce that soon we will release a 3:49 video which documents how we created a stanza by juxtaposing cut-ups to evoke something which transcends the intent of the original texts. This video will be posted on our YouTube account @CorduroyInstitute
For now, we offer viewers this Reel which captures a fleeting moment from the video recording. In it, a pile of cut-ups from the B. Davis Archive comes into view of the camcorder for the only time in the video. We have added a special backing track which was made by taking the 3:49 video's unique songâitself a derivative work based on a Corduroy Institute pieceâand mangling it inside VCVRack 2 before slowing down the results three times.
We hope you enjoy this unique audiovisual offering. Perhaps it will convince you visit our YouTube channel once the full video is uploaded. If you do, subscribe to the channel so as to not miss this and future forays into our forms of experimental pop research.
https://youtube.com/@corduroyinstitute?si=zMf_iHq4VmTrtGHh
#CorduroyInstitute #eclipseoverthesierra #BDavisArchive #experimentalpop #dreampop #cutups #collage #lyrics #songwriting #stanza #lyricist #dada #analogcollage #cutuplyrics #cutumethod #VCVRack2 #recortes
âThe most deadly picture is a picture of nothing at all. The colors are there, but there is no image, nothing.â ~William S. Burroughs
I think the practice of cut-up is a very witty, interesting form, probably an ancient form of meditation.
Allen Ginsberg