Text Mixing Desk

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Updated: 10/18/2004

Text Mixing Desk: Taking their inspiration from the philosophy of sampling, William Burroughs'' cut-up technique, Jeff Noon''s &"Cobralingus&" project and too many long nights spent on music mixing desks, Nottingham art-text-terrorists the Lazarus Corporation have created an online mixing desk - for writing. The text mixing desk manipulates your writing with a succession of outboard effects - such as the &"transgenderiser&", which swaps the sex of any gender-specific words faster than a Thai plastic surgeon, and the Burroughs inspired &"cut-up engine&" which takes a pair of scissors to your work and dances gleefully on the bleeding remains of your carefully constructed sentences. But why on earth would you want to mangle your precisely worded prose in this way? Well, the Godfather of Beat and author of &"Naked Lunch&", William S Burroughs, explains it best: &"The best writing seems to be done almost by accident but writers until the cut-up method was made explicit ... had no way to produce the accident of spontaneity. You cannot will spontaneity. But you can introduce the spontaneous factor with a pair of scissors.&" ... or in the case of the Lazarus Corporation''s text mixing desk, with some sharply written lines of code. This is, after all, the 21st century.