In the articles The Cut Up Method of Brion Gysin and Between Play and Politics: Dysfunctionality in Digital Art, I couldn’t help but make a vague connection between the spontaneity of the cut up method and the randomization of computer programs/databases used to create digital art.

In The Cut Up Method, William S. Burroughs discusses the surrealist method of creating poetry or prose: take a previously existing work, because “all writing is in fact cut ups” anyway (90), and taking a pair of scissors to it and a), rearrange the the cut ups systematically, by taking  “a page…cut down the middle and cross the middle. You have four sections: 1 2 3 4 . . . one two three four. Now rearrange the sections placing section four with section one and section two with section three” (90), or b) cut up the words in a piece and randomly take those words out of a bag or hat, and rearrange them that way. The first method is less spontaneous, but still creates a accidental work of art, while the second method is absolutely spontaneous. Whatever way the words come out is considered accidental.

Similarly, Marie-Laure Ryan discusses the graphic narrative, Grafik Dynamo. This work “loads narrative fragments presumably written by one of the authors into speech bubbles or text frames, and combines them in real time with images randomly captured from the Internet.” This technique is just as spontaneous as the cut up method, just in a digital form.

My issue is this idea of “spontaneous” art; I just don’t see that it is entirely possible. While the randomization is rather spontaneous, the cut up method and the randomization of internet databases still draw from an original work, or a database. And these original works are connected; the words of a cut up poem were purposefully used in relation to one another. There is already a context created. The same can be applied to the digital form. Yes, the end product is random and seemingly spontaneous, but the photos are drawn from a database and paired with a quotation from the author. The context is vague now, but there is still a context, which makes it difficult for me to believe in truly spontaneous art.