76 lines
3.7 KiB
Markdown
76 lines
3.7 KiB
Markdown
# Chance and Remix
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Four traditions of surrendering authorial control to procedure:
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- **Surrealist exquisite corpse** — Breton et al., 1925. Folded-paper collaborative writing/drawing.
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- **John Cage's chance operations** — *Music of Changes* (1951). Composed via *I Ching* coin tosses.
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- **Burroughs–Gysin cut-up** — *Minutes to Go* (1960). Cut existing text, rearrange.
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- **Situationist détournement** — Debord & Wolman, 1956. Re-edit existing media to subvert original meaning.
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## When to use
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- Existing material feels exhausted; need new structure from same material
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- Stuck inside an authorial voice
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- Want to interrupt your own taste (Cage: your taste is what limits the work)
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- Producing experimental work
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- Subverting source material (détournement)
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## Don't use when
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- You need linear coherence and argument
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- Audience requires polish (cut-edges and discontinuities are usually visible)
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- Source material has copyright issues you can't navigate
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- Using "chance" as alibi for sloppiness (real chance procedures are *strict*)
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## Exquisite corpse
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Surrealists, 1925, rue du Château apartment. The name comes from the first sentence: *"Le cadavre exquis boira le vin nouveau"*.
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**Procedure**: 3+ participants. First writes a sentence fragment, folds the paper to hide it, passes. Second sees only the last few words and continues. Repeat. Unfold at end.
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Variants: drawings (head/torso/legs in three folds), single-author asynchronous (write, hide for a day, write next), distributed by chat or mail.
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## Cage chance operations
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**Procedure**:
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1. Define what gets randomized (pitch, duration, dynamics, tempo).
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2. Pick a chance device (coin tosses, dice, RNG, *I Ching*).
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3. Let the device determine the parameters.
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4. Notate / build / perform the result.
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5. **Use what comes out.** Overriding for taste defeats the operation.
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Variants: time-bracket scores (Cage's late practice — windows within which sounds occur). Algorithmic chance (script-driven). Generative systems (Eno's *Music for Airports*, *Reflection*).
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## Cut-up technique
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Gysin, Beat Hotel Paris, 1959. Bowie used it for *Diamond Dogs*, *Heroes*, *Outside*. Thom Yorke for *Kid A*.
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**Procedure**:
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1. Take a page of existing text — your own draft, a newspaper, a manual, anything.
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2. Cut into fragments — by line, phrase, or word.
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3. Shuffle.
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4. Reassemble. Don't force coherence; use the new juxtapositions.
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5. Use the strongest combinations as starting points.
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Variants: fold-in (Burroughs — fold one page over another). Voice cut-ups (tape splice). Algorithmic cut-up (script).
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## Détournement
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Debord & Wolman, 1956. Take an existing piece of media and re-edit / re-caption / re-purpose to invert its meaning. The political stakes are explicit: dominant-culture critique using its own materials.
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**Procedure**:
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1. Select source material whose meaning you want to invert.
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2. Identify the *minimum* modification that produces the subversion. (Power comes from recognizability of the source.)
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3. Apply: re-caption, re-edit, re-frame, re-context.
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4. Distribute.
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Examples: Debord's *La Société du spectacle* film (1973) is largely détourned feature footage with new voiceover. May 1968 Paris graffiti détourned advertising copy. Adbusters subvertising tradition.
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## Anti-slop notes
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- "Generate randomly" without a specified procedure is slop. State *what* is randomized, by *what* mechanism.
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- Don't generate cut-up text by guessing what cut-up sounds like. Run the actual procedure on real text.
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- Don't romanticize. The procedures are specific.
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- Détournement requires a target. Generic "subversive remixes" without specific source-and-target are vibe.
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Sources: Cage, *Silence* (Wesleyan, 1961); Burroughs & Gysin, *The Third Mind* (Viking, 1978); Debord & Wolman, "Mode d'emploi du détournement" (*Les Lèvres Nues* 8, 1956).
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