Other stuff
yet to try
Forget this.
- cut-up technique is when written text is cut up and rearranged to create a new text. USed by the Dadaists of the 1920s; popularized in the 1950s especially by writer William S. Burroughs. Example: Tristan Tzara's TO MAKE A DADAIST POEM (1920).
- Fold-in is when taking two sheets of linear text, folding each sheet in half vertically and combining with the other, then reading across the resulting page. Example: William S. Burroughs, The Third Mind (1978).
- vocabularyclept poetry: taking the words of one poem and rearranging them into a new one. Example: Howard Bergerson's Winter Retrospect (1941). A better known variant is Dave Kapell's magnetic poetry. There is an example on this site.
- found poetry is when taking words, phrases, and sometimes whole passages from other sources and reframing them. Types of common forms and practices of found poetry include free form excerpting and remixing, erasure, cento and cut-up. Example: Bern Porter, Found Poems (1972)
Clearly, similar techniques are used in graphics, audio, and video. Call it a text-centered form of collage. That term is often applied to modernist painting. Example: Pablo Picasso, Nature-morte à la chaise cannée (1912).
Readymade is a comparable term.
Others, stressing the role of chance, call it "eleatoricism", a term commonly associated with music composed by change. An example is Karlheinz Stockhausen's Gesang der Jünglinge (1955–56).
The term reminds me of Un coup de dés jamais n'abolira le hasard (A roll of the dice will never abolish chance), itself a visual poem, by Stéphane Mallarmé, first published in the French journal Cosmopolis in 1897. A chance machine is not chance. See here and here.
When there isn't much; things have to be made. Emphasis on techniques, materials, subjects. Academy. Patronage. When there is much, things can be recombined and art reinvents itself; it was always about creation but not necessarily in that way. This matters because now there is more than ever. And much of it recombined.
other
- the flipbox as verbal Necker cube
- the letter-changing slider