VORN: Cut ups

A writer and artist (William Burroughs and Brion Gysin) did some experimenting with cutting up text and others with cutting up pictures to juxtapose them to find meaning in things that had never been put together before. They would take random pages, divide them into squares (2x2), cut up the squares and then put random squares next to each other, lining up the text, to make new pages.

There's an implementation of this idea at Understanding VORN.

I'm fascinated by it. It hasn't inspired me yet but I think it's really cool. :-)

What they've done is pull random pictures whose tags start with the letters V,O,R,N. (For vorn magazine, a German based art magazine. Vorn means "ahead", "in front", "to the fore".) Then it displays them as a block.

Here's their explanation:

Every five minutes it scours thousands of weblogs [Flikr and LiveJournal it says lower on the page], searching for the four most recently posted pictures that begin with the letters 'V', 'O', 'R', 'N'. Every five minutes, UNDERSTANDING VORN changes, filled with fresh words and pictures from the blogosphere.