Welcome to the home page of Voltron's Magick
Cutup Machine.
Purpose
The Magick Cutup Machine is intended to help the user understand deep, potentially complex textual information by presenting the information in a unique way. There are other uses as well.
The Machine reads some text, cuts it into smaller pieces, then shuffles these pieces up. This is the simplest way to use and understand the Machine. While of course the Machine may be used in this simple way--the output of the machine is often rather funny, depending on what the input is--there is a deeper purpose.
warning: pop-psychology ahead
The human mind makes associations all the time. In fact, most 'knowledge' is simply a set of associated facts and processes.
To remember events in
life, one builds up and retains a lot of coincidental information: the
smell of the nearby wet dog, the sounds of the children playing, the color of the coat of the friend who is speaking.
If one wants to strongly remember a significant event, one
can recall all of this coincidental information; doing so leads to a
truly vivid memory. When one smells a perfume that a past lover
regularly wore, memories of that person arise.
When one tries to understand something new, or even something old, one will dredge up all sorts of past associations which were made when encountering similar situations. How
one experiences the world now depends on what one has learned and
integrated in the past.
The Magick Cutup Machine helps the user overcome such limitations. It forces the user's mind to consider new relationships between concepts. Simply by reordering a text, new meanings are found in
strange juxtapositions. Thus in its most simplistic use, the Machine
helps to open user's mind.
I'm a firm believer in the power of the "unconscious" mind. This is the
part of the brain that does all of its processing below the conscious
level of thought. It is where we find reflexes and instincts, for
instance. The unconscious mind receives and processes enormous amounts of information, often much more than the conscious mind does. This is because the conscious mind has a tendency to view reality in a certain way--the way
it's learned reality must
behave. Sometimes the unconscious mind sends messages informing the conscious ego-mind that perhaps there is more to the world beyond the ego itself. These come in dreams or those 'weird feelings' one gets or countless
other ways. The Magick Cutup Machine offers another way for the
unconcious mind to communicate.
It seems to me that communication is best accomplished when there is a creative medium involved. For instance, a painter communicates through
her artwork and a poet expresses her feelings through her words. A
filmmaker communicates through fast flickering video images. Relating
this to unconscious-mind communication, the best methods are those that
involve creativity. Dancing is a fine way of communication
subliminally (viz. ritual dancing all around the world). The artist
Austin Osman Spare used a technique called 'automatic drawing.' Others
use 'automatic writing.' What all of these have in common is they
provide a way for the conscious mind to 'slip away' and the unconscious
mind to express itself directly.
The Magick Cutup Machine provides a similar creative medium. The
Machine has a drawing canvas, enabled with a checkbox in the main
interface. After the user enters the text, selects her cutup parameters, and clicks 'Cutup' the drawing canvas displays. She clicks the canvas once. At this point the canvas has been activated and text-cutting begins. The mouse movements she makes directly cause the text to be cut. The exact selection of which text-segment to swap with another depends on the mouse position. This means, at a higher level of understanding, that the picture she draws affects how the text is cut.
The user does not have conscious control over the
resulting text unless she can perform modulus calculations in her
conscious mind very rapidly. However, there is the possibility for
unconscious
control. For the most effective (unconscious) use the user must do two
things:
- Learn to 'mouse automatically.' Let the body move
the mouse around without conscious intervention.
- Train the unconscious mind to the relationship that governs cut
points. The quickest way to do this is to do some practice runs.
Take a
list of things, your favorite vegetables perhaps, and enter them into
the Machine. Open the canvas and, for a short period of time,
concentrate your movements in one quadrant of the canvas. Observe the
result, then do the same in the other quadrants, then just in the
middle. Practice this a few times over some days to make sure your
unconscious really understands. Use different lists.
After practicing the Machine may be used effectively. Here are some examples:
- Write a biography of yourself for a specific time of your life.
Tune yourself to the Machine (i.e. do some trancing and try to get the
concious mind to slip away) then cut your text up. Write down your
thoughts about the results.
- Perform divination by typing in the names of the Tarot Major Arcana or the Runes. You could assign the position of words in the output some meaning. (Be sure to set the "Segment Length" for this). For example, the Celtic Cross:
- position 1: The basic situation
- position 2: Influences hindering or furthering the basic situation
- position 3: Conscious thoughts about the situation
- position 4: Unconscious thoughts about the situation
- position 5: Past influences
- position 6: Future influences
- position 7: What the subject thinks about herself, with respect to the situation
- position 8: What others think about the subject, with respect to the situation.
- position 9: Hopes and fears
- position 10: Outcome
- Cut up your poetry or prose in order to lead your writing in new directions and help you make connections between ideas and words which you might not have thought of before.
Check the
Links section for more information on the concepts of cutup and automatic drawing.
Usage
Execution
- On the command line, type "java -jar vjcutup.jar"
- In Windows, opening the Explorer then clicking on the file should work. If not, you'll have to read some documentation, sorry. The jar file is prepared as an executable, so it should "just work."
- In KDE or GNOME, there should already be an association between jar files and the java interpreter. It's easy enough to set up if that's not the case.
- In konqueror, the file association should be "/path/to/java -jar %f".
What to Do
Type some text into the input area or load a file. Configure with the buttons near the bottom of the screen. Click "Cutup".
Configuration
The Machine is configurable in a number of ways; what follows is a detailed explanation of what they all mean.
The Canvas
With the "Use Canvas" button, you may choose whether the cut-operation is driven by your mouse movements or happens simply randomly. If you choose not to use the canvas, please be aware of the following:
- The Machine performs exactly 500 swaps. Perhaps later this will be configurable. If you text is longer than 500 segments, some parts won't get shuffled at all. Use the canvas instead.
- Don't use the random seed field unless you change the seed every time you cut. If you don't give a seed the Machine uses the current time. The reason this is important is because random number generators really don't generate random sequences at all. They generate a pretty-random-looking sequence of numbers. The same seed will always result in the same sequence. The same sequence makes for boring cutups!
When you do use the canvas, the mouse's position is translated into 10 different numbers, where each number refers to some segment in the input text. That means that each time you move the mouse 1 pixel, 5 segments are swapped with 5 other segments. Note, this operation is neither random nor pseudo-random. Segment swapping, i.e. cutting, is directly due to you and your movements.
After you enter text and press "Cutup" the main window turns black. Click one time; at this point the cutup operation begins. You can now draw on the canvas by moving the mouse. Click again and it stops; the program displays the output text.
Random Seed
As mentioned above, the random number generator (really one should say "random sequence generator" but that's not particularly clear, is it?) doesn't create anything truly random. The sequence of numbers that it outputs entirely depends on the starting position, the so-called "seed." With the Magickal Cutup Machine,
you choose the seed. The seed may be any sequence of letters, numbers or symbols. The algorithm that determines what the integer value of the seed is simply uses the "latin-1" unicode value of the input. Note: that means that Russian or Chinese or other non-Western keyboards won't work for the seed.
In the Machine, random numbers are used for the following reasons:
- When the canvas is not used, segment-swap positions are determined through random numbers. Refer to the Canvas section for more information.
- The colors shown on the canvas are chosen using random numbers.
- Some line breaks are added to the output text.
- If "Use Random Segment Length" is enabled, the length of each segment is determined using random numbers.
- Part of the translation from mouse position to positions in the text uses random numbers (I don't want to explain here how or why, but trust me that this doesn't mean that the segments that are swapped are chosen randomly. You really do control which segments are swapped. Email me if you want to know.)
Segment Length, Use Random Segment Length
The input text is divided into discrete segments; the segments get shuffled and are shown in the output. This configuration option lets you choose how many words are in each segment. For English, 3 is the magic number that will result in near-sensible output. ("hit the ball", "under the table", "I love Saan"). If you know the magic number for another language, please
tell me!
If you choose "Use Random Segment Length" then the number of words in each segment will be chosen randomly, with the maximum number of words determined by "Segment Length". Each segment's length is determined independently.
Max Line Length, Restrict Line Length
The output text area will wrap text automatically. However, the cutup text is often not so readable that way. Enabling "Restrict Line Length" will ensure that in the output all lines will have lengths less than or equal to the "Max Line Length". Before output, the Machine will insert line breaks here and there, regardless of whether "Restrict Line Length" is enabled.
The Software
Voltron's Magick Cutup Machine is copylefted by Voltron Rex and is
released
under the GNU GPL. Read the information available at the
GNU website if you want to know more. Essentially this means you may change this program in any way you see fit, except for the parts I used that are released under a different license. If you redistribute any of this program, in any
form, you must release your changes under the GNU GPL, again excepting those parts that I didn't write. Don't steal,
share!
Requirements
- Java (1.4 or higher, probably works in 1.3)
Download
There's a lot of information available about the concepts discussed
here:
As for information about the unconscious and how to communicate with
it, I recommend
reading
Cosmic Trigger by Robert Anton Wilson, all of Spare's
works,
Stealing The Fire From Heaven by Stephen Mace, and
Trance: From Magic to Technology by Dennis R. Wier.
Contact
If you use this software and like it, or hate it, or are indifferent
and just want to write some email, send it to voltron AT onlinehome DOT
denospm. This email is in Germany, so remove the letters after 'de'.
Credit
Many Many Thanks to Saan for her help on this project. I couldn't have done it without her.
