William Burroughs Cut Up Technique

E’ con grande piacere che pubblichiamo questo saggio di microstoria di Edmund Berger redatto in prima stesura nel 2014 per l’antologia di area accelerazionista Dark Glamour. Poi, alcune dilazioni del progetto e cambi di editori e curatori, hanno fatto sì che «Underground Streams» non abbia mai visto la luce nella forma che qui presentiamo e dunque non abbia ricevuto l’attenzione che avrebbe meritato. Ora che il progetto Dark Glamour pare realizzarsi nel corso del 2017 con un nuovo editor, Amy Ireland, membro del collettivo xenofemminista Laboria Cuboniks, Edmund Berger ha giustamente deciso di ri-scrivere completamente, tre anni dopo, il saggio che risulterà ovviamente differente rispetto al testo che qui presentiamo. Underground Streams (2014) è stato dunque scritto un anno prima del classico Grungy Accelerationism (2015), e rappresenta a livello temporale il primo saggio in cui Berger si cimenta con il pensiero del primo accelerazionismo (Land e CCRU) e del secondo (Srnicek e Williams), «secondo accelerazionismo» che Berger definisce qui come Neo-Accelerazionismo. Autore Edmund Berger, traduzione di Letizia Rustichelli e Paolo Davoli, grafiche di Gabriele Fantuzzi (Delicatessen).

For the Ammerman Center’s Biennial Symposium on Arts and Technology, Creator/Director Mallory Catlett, Sound-artist/Performer G Lucas Crane, and Dramaturg/Scholar Alex Wermer-Colan will present their ongoing project, Decoder 2017, a three-part concert series exploring the language and prophecies of William S. Burroughs on the merging of body, media, and machine. In the early 60’s and 70’s, William Burroughs wrote an elaborate set of instructions, encoded in novels and essays for how to use technology to escape control - societal, political and self-imposed. What emerged was a prophecy and a biological language for the technological takeover of the human nervous system. 
Decoder 2017 is first and foremost a cut-up machine that follows his instructions to confront the physical sensation of living today. This machine is turning out concerts one for each book of the “Nova Trilogy” (Soft Machine, Ticket That Exploded & Nova Express). It is played by cassette-tape DJ and sound artist G Lucas Crane and performer Jim Findlay, who act as both fictional characters and real-time systems operators cutting internet debris into kaleidoscopic dreamscapes, prophetic pronouncements and obscene routines that expose our complicity in the systems that control us. At the heart of the machine is an interface that connects the DJ via sensors on his tape decks to an array of technology that allow the analog body to control digital imagery.  
In each concert there is an augmentation in the machine to mirror Burroughs’ evolving literary techniques. Where as Soft Machine experiments with more rudimentary cut-ups, a violent barrage of visual and auditory juxtapositions, Ticket That Exploded deploys the fold-in method, creating kaleidoscopic images, folded down the middle and triangulated. As we craft the final part of the series, Nova Express, we are experimenting with new feedback systems, as well as immersing the audience with 360-degree video. All these techniques are designed to induce visual hallucinations and a sense of enclosure within the system we are creating.