Brion Gysin was a British-Canadian painter, writer, sound poet, performance artist and inventor of experimental devices.
Brion Gysin
Rue Gît-le-Cœur, Paris; site of Beat Hotel
Plaque commemorating site of Beat Hotel
David Woodard and William S. Burroughs stand behind Dreamachine, circa 1997
The cut-up technique is an aleatory literary technique in which a written text is cut up and rearranged to create a new text. The concept can be traced to the Dadaists of the 1920s, but it was developed and popularized in the 1950s and early 1960s, especially by writer William S. Burroughs. It has since been used in a wide variety of contexts.
A text created from lines of a newspaper tourism article
William S. Burroughs, popularizer of the technique