The cut-up (or “cutup”) is a method of juxtaposition where a work (usually text) is cut into pieces and the pieces rearranged in a random order, similar to the montage or collage technique in painting. The traditional cut-ups of Brion Gysin and William S. Burroughs were done manually with scissors, razor blades, axes and other cutting devices. (Netmonkey.com has published an excellent summary of the theory behind the cut-up method, and another good one is in Brion Gysin’s own words.)

Scissors are no longer necessary for making cut-ups; they can be performed more efficiently using a digital computer. The following is a list of open source tools for cutting up etexts and other data using open-source software. The best of these tools improve on the process, generating Markov chains from text input and who knows what else.

Note that the cut-up does not free the artist from the duty of expression; cut-ups serve as a compositional aid and are not a substitute for the act of composition itself.

• Florian Cramer’s “Permutations” contains what he calls “the only technically ‘proper’ CGI-Adaption of Gysin’s/Burroughs’ cutup method.” (All of the site’s Perl source code is GPLed.)
• Lee Worden offers a similar cutup CGI which uses a different algorithm than Florian’s, but is also easy to use.
• cutup, part of the tinyutils package (deprecated), is a small shell script for cutting up an input text file into four sections and then reassembling the slices diagonally. (a Perl rewrite should feature the ability to choose the number of x- and y- slices on the text.)
• Luke Kelley’s Cut-Up Machine is a Web cgi that lets you insert up to 100 elements from Naked Lunch into the output text.
• English as She is Spoken is Jonathan Feinberg’s Python script which takes text and runs it through AltaVista’s Translations service, and then runs the output through again, multiple times until no further “linguistic mutations” occur.
• An earlier Translations tool is the Transmogrifier; this tool powers a multi-lingual chat room (within 10 years you will probably be able to select a default language in your net interface and see the entire Internet translated in such fashion.)
• chef is a lex scanner for outputting its input text in the dialogue of a Swedish chef; the Debian filters package contains a bunch of these little text dialogue filters.
• The Shannonizer takes text or URL input and outputs a translation by a number of famous writers, including Hunter S. Thompson and Lewis Carroll.
• BABLE is a Perl script that generates Markov chains. It works best on large texts.
• Dissociated Press is an Emacs function for “dissociating” the current buffer, combining words and characters to form newords and charcatures; in Emacs, type:
  

  M-x dissociated-press <RET>

• Jamie Zawinski’s dadadodo generates Markov chains of word frequencies. One of its best features is the ability to scan a given text and write a compiled object file which you can then use later to generate output based on the original text.
• JWZ’s latest is webcollage, which builds a collage of random images from the Web on the root window of your X session.

  Ideas for improvements/expansions to webcollage:

  • ability to specify a single host or localhost directory tree when searching for images;
  • ability to specify the number of random images to output (coupled with the above gives a random-image cgi that could be useful for Web sites).
  • ability to save the image from the root window to a file (with as many of the original file properties saved as possible)
  • ability to limit images from a site or sites (say, display random images from eBay auctions)
  • integrated with the window manager so that a double-click with the left mouse button (say) opens a default web browser window with the URL of the originating image; a triple-click (say) pastes the URL to the X selection.
  • option for outputting to an .html file, either with x number of <img src> lines or with an image map
  • including a text option so that random pages/paragraphs/sentences/words/chars of text can be added to the output

This last one leads to an idea for an avant-garde web-art project: you write a program that obtains random text from the Web and then outputs that text in HTML, with random links interspersed through the text (the link heuristics are configured by a filter file whose entries contain two lines: the pattern to match in the input text and the link to use in the output, either a specific URL or a text value, in which case it uses a random URL containing that text); the resultant page is then a hypertext cut-up. Will sites allow you to link to them in such a context? Will linking out of context be outlawed? Or will popular browsers eventually contain cut-up-mode toggles, enabling a network of enthusiasts to trade and morph their filters, even holding filter-contests for the most unique views of/traversals through the Web?

Free software cutup tools are described in The Linux Cookbook, 2nd edition.

Related to this subject is a page on computer-generated writing.

As is Fuse by Scott Draves. The algorithm is inspired by dissociated-press but works on images, not text.

Another related subject is generative art — art where devices such as computers are used to generate source material (which, as with cut-ups, may then be reinterpreted, modified and otherwise used by the artist). Like cut-ups, it poses interesting philosophical issues of authorship and the creation or invention process. The definitive site for generative art research and free software tools is www.generative.net.

Wikimapia: a community-driven geomapping project

A preview of Microsoft’s project

More…

wiki

The GNU version, Gawk

short outline and intro

a page about AWK programming

AWK tutorials, articles and books

Eric Pement’s awk intro and list of handy one-liners

“An Awk Primer”

simple awk tutorial

“how to use awk

interactive awk tutorial

Awk by example: 1 2 3

The original “awl” book by Alfred V. Aho, Brian W. Kernighan and Peter J. Weinberger: The AWK Programming Language

Free online book: Gawk: Effective AWK Programming

ToC for another online awk book

a list of awk scripts

awk FAQ

All about “undeleting” a file in Linux

“Recovering files from /Proc”

“Our Continuing /proc and lsof Investigation”

“Deleted files recovery howto”

“Undeleting opened files on ext3”

smallest writeup on deleted files ever

Then again this might even beat it

Using lsof to troubleshoot a Linux filesystem

This story of an intruder placing a backdoor in a program relates to file recovery on linux.

You might also want to see the Linux ext3 faq.

customization tips

Emacs and Outlines

Using Outline Mode

using it for papers and writing a draft

outline editing for html

Making a numbered outline with outline-mode

GROFF, Troff, and roff

Wiki: the troff macros and troff

The troff.org site

On getting the “real” troff

Groff home page [more]

Groff forum

GNU Troff intro

Putting your resume in troff (and part 2)

Online groff resources

dir listing of software

short intro

The Grap language for typesetting charts and graphs

roff docs

using ps fonts with groff

Groff MOM macros: search

Also known as “Orton imagery,” the technique invented by stock photographer Michael Orton in the 1970s. He used a tripod to take two slide photos of a scene, one underexposed and another overexposed and blurry; by superimposing the two slides, the resultant image gave the scene a glowing, ethereal, “otherworldly” effect.

There are ways of reproducing the Orton effect on digital images. There’s a Flickr Orton group and a “definitive tutorial.”

There are various ways to do this with open-source free software tools. All references to “orton” and “gimp”. [images]

See the Gimparoo! tutorial (an adaptation of a Photoshop tutorial) [more]

Chris Empey’s open source tutorial for emulating the Orton technique. [original]

Another Gimp tutorial.

There are also plugins, such as the orton effect plugin [example] but I’ve found, as with the fakelomo plugins, the hands-on image modifcation you can do yourself is better than the plugins almost all of the time.

Michael Orton’s book, Photographing Creative Landscapes: Simple Tools for Artistic Images and Enhanced Creativity

There’s a whole book of it, Klaus Goelker’s illustrated GIMP 2 for Photographers: Image Editing with Open Source Software. Here’s a collection of online GIMP tutorials, articles and sites for retouching and improving digital photographs.

The OSP Wiki is a wikified collection of tutorials on open source photography. [flickr group] [tutorials]

reducing CCD noise (should be always done to reduce noise in images, esp. indoor and low-light shots)

cosmetic retouching [more]

retouching portraits (using the “healing” tool to fix skin tones and blemishes)

post-processing an image with curves, giving a “glowing” effect, softening the light (good for portraits & people shots)

“airbrush a pretty girl” tutorial on smoothing skin, removing blemishes, using blurs and changing colors [archive]

sampling toned images (make your digital images look like great b/w film or with sepia tones)

gaussian blur overlays

See the Gimp users group on Flickr.

Outline of digital photography techniques.

“A Photographer’s Guide to Image Sizing”

“Snatchify” a photo image.

A high-pass filter sketch effect (turn a photo of a person or object into a drawing)

Using Perl-O-Tine to slice and cut an image for putting in a web layout.

Use photos to make textured image backgrounds.

Super-cheap lo-fi medium-format plastic cameras with wide-angle lenses and leaky boxes, like the famous Russian Holga, are all the rage for lomo photography. There’s a few ways to “fake” the lomography effect with digital images using the Gimp and open-source, free software tools.

The first way is to follow any of the many Photoshop tutorials on the subject and try to apply them to the Gimp.

I’ve had good success using Flickr user ultrapop design’s straightforward tutorial, which she has on this page with her beautiful fakelomo of the Palace of Fine Arts, San Francisco (one of the best fakelomos ever!); follow the step-by-step instructions and try to apply them to the Gimp. (Not all commands and tools will be the same.)

There are other Photoshop tutorials you can use to base your work on, too: there’s one on
“Faking the lomo effect” and another way, quite similar. Another site has a photoshop tutorial on getting a “Velvia” look and another one on lomography.

One of my favorites is part of the “two minute tricks” series (no. 14): Holgafy

There’s a Photoshop lomo tutorial that’s been rewritten for the Gimp.

Some tutorials have been written specifically for the Gimp. Here’s instructions for faking lomo with gimp.

There are actual fakelomo plugins for the Gimp. I’ve only had moderate success with them.

Plugins: gimplomo.scm page, an updated lomo filter, lomo-gimp, a “Photoshop-quality lomo plugin for the GIMP”; and lomofu [example].

But the the best plug-in of all might be this gimp 2.4 script that also mucks with the colors, giving that early-70s look.

For further reference

Lomo Fakers League (Flickr pool)

Get the book that details the philosophy: Don’t Think, Just Shoot

Search for more…

Tilt-shift photography uses special lenses to change the perspective and depth of field; the lens is both tilted and shifted according to the Scheimpflug principle. [more] A popular use of tilt-shift photography is for minature faking, making a “real” scene look as if it’s an artificial minature model. [more] [50 examples]

There are methods for digital software as well as homemade devices and mods for your camera.

Homemade tilt-shift projects

Captain nod’s Plungercam 2 uses plumbing supplies and gives you the effect of a Lensbaby on the cheap ($25). [photo] [test video]

Tilt-shift photography with the Gimp

There are techniques to do this with the Gimp and other open-source, free software tools. [discussion]

The results are every bit as good as traditional, film-based tilt-shift. [more]

Gimp tilt-shift tutorials:

• Gimparoo’s fake tilt-shift tutorial
• “A Better Fake Tilt-Shift With The Gimp.”
• Bart Busschotts’ Gimp tilt-shift photo experience and newer, more detailed instructions.
• A Photoshop tilt-shift tutorial that’s been rewritten and modified for the Gimp.

What does it look like when done? Here’s an example of one photographer’s attempt with Gimp.

For further reference

Flickr’s tilt-shift minature fakes pool.

A Photoshop tutorial for the fake model effect.

See the special tilt-shift lenses for Canon cameras stocked by Amazon.

Search google for more…