William Burroughs : Cut Ups

Just look out of your window, take a walk down the nearest street. Do it again.

The nature of such seemingly banal activities are peppered with varied means of interpretation.

Your walk down a familiar street becomes increasingly unfamiliar the more times you walk it.

Attributes become transparent as idiosyncrasies are reduced to a means of getting from one point in space to another.

You see a gate made from old parts of a bicycle, a hand written note with the suggestion "learn how to park, you prick." tucked on the underside of a windscreen wiper.

Absorb them.

You see a familiar face without a name being sliced into two as a car accelerates past your vision, only for the familiar stranger to reconfigure into their original shape, and disappear through a door way.

Although you won't possibly know it, this street will never be the same again

William Burrough's Cut-ups system of creating new forms of media often work in a similar way.

Literature taken from other writers such as Ginsberg and Orlovsky, and varied pieces of film footage and spoken prose are torn apart (sometimes quite literally) and reconfigured to manifest the same familiar strangeness of common affairs.

Just look out of your window, take a walk down the nearest street. Do it again.

The nature of such seemingly banal activities are peppered with varied means of interpretation.

Your walk down a familiar street becomes increasingly unfamiliar the more times you walk it.

Attributes become transparent as idiosyncrasies are reduced to a means of getting from one point in space to another.

You see a gate made from old parts of a bicycle, the hand written note tucked under the wiper blade has gone, so too has the familiar stranger.

You see a cloud straight above that resembles a walrus wrestling a lion.

Absorb them.

Your recognition of the street you knew has altered, but goes almost unnoticed.

You feel different, but the same.