Cut Up: William Burroughs

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Tue 12 October 2004 // 20:00 *

Cut Up: William Burroughs
(Tues 12th Oct / 8pm / £2 ttt)

Tonight we celebrate the hugely influential cut up experiments of WILLIAM BURROUGHS through the 50s, 60s and 70s in an evening juxtaposing film, spoken word and special audio-visual commissions.
Cut Up is a form of collage in which BURROUGHS literally cut up passages of prose and then pasted them back together again. He believed the results came much closer to the facts of human perception than linear narrative. "Life is a cut up", he insisted, and cutting through the word in this way was the most extreme facelift prose ever got. Similarly revolutionary experiments with the new technology of home recording followed (in the process pioneering the world's earliest examples of sampling and tape manipulation) and reached their logical conclusion in three radical films made with ANTHONY BALCH that had to be saved from the skip in the 80s by GENESIS P-ORRIDGE of the band Throbbing Gristle. With the techniques popularised by the likes of BRIAN ENO and DAVID BOWIE and gaining renewed relevance in the digital age, tonight we're going to disrupt the reality tapes once again. This will be an interactive evening exploring BURROUGHS's ideas across different media.
Bring your own cut up film/audio for us to show in the auditorium, or perform a reading of your written experiments.