Excerpter is a simple program inspired by William S Burrough's and Bob Dylan's cut-up technique, which you can see an example of right here:
Pulling from 80+ original lines of text, the Excerpter will give you a random assortment of prose, allowing you to draw your own narrative lines and meaning. Random points will be bolded, spaced out, underlined, or italicized, and illustrations are invoked to accompany text. Through this, we can see how all these factors can influence how and why we digest narratives. I hope this program works to your entertainment and edification.
Okay, but what's the point of this?
Well, the real point of it is found in the lack of a point—it's an exercise in assembling your own personal significance across random, ostensibly unrelated phrases and images. Through the cut-up method, new stories are assembled from the parts of each other, finding intertextual meaning that just occurs at the right confluence of personal reflection and mere happenstance.
How was this made?
This project is a combination of HTML for text output and organization, CSS for aesthetic elements, and JavaScript for the randomization mechanics. The drawings were composed using sketchbooks, restaurant napkins, and finally either Adobe Illustrator or Canva (depending on the day and demands).
The video is taken from the 1967 Bob Dylan documentary "Don't Look Back"
Sound components were sourced from freesound_community on Pixabay.
For questions, complaints, or conversation, I can be reached at rpw21@pitt.edu