Description
Cutups is a space that allows users to explore the recombination of existent text on a webpage so that new meanings and uses may be discovered and articulated.
Introduction & Inspiration
The political dimension of information exchanged on networks has a long history. Whether it be in the postal system, the electronic telegraph network, or Internet these systems of discourse have become the vehicles of both control and dissent. According to myth, Cleopatra had herself "mailed" to Julius Caesar in a rug in order to meet with him secretly and gain favor. During the Civil War in the United States politically charged images where found on the outside of envelopes as early as the mid 1850s when the divisions between North and South first began to manifest themselves. Through their travel, propagandist messages penetrated the borders of the Northern and Southern states. In 1916 citizens of Dublin Ireland took control of post offices and severed telegraph wires in an attempt to cut off communications with England.
On the other hand, language itself has undergone a major political critique throughout the 20th century by artists, writers, philosophers, and linguists. William Burroughs viewed language as a foreign force, a virus that had control over humanity and must be exercised in order for one to realize true freedom. Burroughs himself drew upon the work of Dadaist Tristan Tzara who in 1916 caused an uproar by pulling random words from a hat in order to construct a new poem. It was by employing this type of chance operation that Burroughs wrote his novel Naked Lunch, a book that caused much commotion and became the center of many heated debates concerning the right to free speech in literature. This approach was not limited to those of a certain region or nationality as is demonstrated in the work beba coca cola by Brazilian poet De´cio Pignatari where the simple rearrangement of characters in words coca cola provide the means for a critique.
The Shiftspace platform provides a rich and flexible enough toolset that the joining of these two threads is possible. On the one-hand, a network of users is already in place and engaged in the contestation of dominant ideologies, on the other, the shiftspace API allows for the development of text manipulation tools.
User Scenario
A user navigates to a given web page and invokes the Shifspace console and the Cutups space. The Cutups space allows the user to select from a variety of manipulations. Currently, those are to perform a random sort, to alphabetize, or to reverse alphabetize. The user checks what manipulation it is they want to perform using radio buttons and then turns the space on using a checkbox. The user may then select a block of text with the cursor and when the mouse button is released the given manipulation will be performed on the text string.
The video below shows Cutups in action. Note that this does not currently work within the Shiftspace environment and is under development. The look and interface will change to make it more in sync with the current design of Shiftspace. Also, a finer level of control for sorting characters or groups of words in a given string is planed.