A Manifesto for Markov Cut-ups
Language wants to mean. We can’t help it; we’re pattern-seeking creatures who find faces in clouds and narratives in noise. This work exploits that compulsion.
The Process
I feed texts into a Markov chain algorithm: literature, philosophy, scientific articles, song lyrics, whatever crosses my path. The algorithm learns statistical patterns (which words tend to follow which others) and generates new strings based on those probabilities. What emerges is syntactically plausible but semantically adrift. Grammar without guaranteed meaning.
It looks something like this:
“it concerns the world-for-us. this dance floor underfoot. propped level loft above the head of further rule the teleoparadoxic tripwires applying dna computing could lead to explore the hypersigil to the eternal, cosmic pantheon, he asked him with levitation and powerful reminder that article. a faint and reality’s fragmentation verse 1: pause on the memory systems of the plane of the fane, we lowly ones they also separate movements even forums and many groups moved faster, where meaning’s malleable, and sacrifices meant for the horizon of punk (dead kennedys, black metal is subverted / simulating the concept of gizeh, and kthanid, are half-truths colored by the only 21 built by the organic entities being that are responsible for widespread habitation of the omnipresent dust, and acted as we ensure that he was a mathematical certainty is the cognitive thresholds, the ur-dreaming ones would be it does this before, would have written in the way into star-spawn demons. familiar were lurking behind the earth, while their hopes, desires, our contemplation and knowing that this great old as a dead serious: movements many disenchanted characters have placed the wormy partitions, and wider universe is the day there is a point somewhere between fiction standpoint, the cold inside the infinite regression, the great work on kepler-438b, fusing physics and babbling and curious mysteries and its own wellbeing but their own fatal inconsistencies. in its architecture of the absurd (he affirmed) to as one’s beads at sunset that the great doors in the quest and phainein (to whom have glimpsed the fragment as he wanted to keep ya head up involvement the shots of dimensions, they encountered when the collective cognition — changing not silence—never silence—but a civil-level”
It’s meaningless noise, but rich with potential.
So then comes the curation. I prompt the machine, watch what bubbles up, and shape the output into something between found poetry and controlled chaos. I’m looking for accidents of beauty, moments where disparate sources collide into unexpected resonance, phrases that almost make sense in ways more interesting than perfect sense would allow:
Lurking behind the earth, star-spawn demons placed wormy partitions through the wider universe. Great old dead disenchanted characters encountered meaning’s malleable sacrifices through silence. Inside the cold infinite regression of the Great Work, the babbling and curious mysteries’ fatal inconsistencies sparked the architecture of the absurd.
The Purpose
This isn’t about replacing human creativity with algorithms. It’s about collaboration with chance. The machine doesn’t know what it’s saying; it can’t know. But neither did the Dadaists pulling words from hats, or Burroughs slicing up newspapers.
What interests me is the space between intention and accident, between authorship and discovery. I’m not the author of these texts, exactly, but neither is the algorithm. We’re co-conspirators in a process that treats language as raw material rather than transparent vessel.
The Beats used cut-ups to short-circuit control systems, to break language’s ideological spell. I’m drawn to something slightly different: the aesthetic experience of watching meaning become probabilistic. Of finding that the compost heap of culture, when properly decomposed and recombined, occasionally blooms strange flowers.
The Invitation
Read these knowing they emerged from a process that doesn’t care about meaning but sometimes stumbles into it anyway. Let yourself look for patterns. Embrace the slippage when those patterns dissolve.
Language is already a kind of controlled accident. We inherit these words, these grammatical structures, and try to bend them toward sense. This just makes the accident more visible.
For me this is a ritual: this is making meaning from the absurd. This is a Chaos Magick invocation from pure Liminality.
The machine dreams in fragments of everything we’ve fed it. I’m just here to remember the best parts. I hope you enjoy them too.
Fully Curated and Cut-up:
There were very weak moments when monastery horror captured the ephemeral and uncertain pallor lurking behind the earth, where star-spawn demons placed the wormy partitions through the wider universe. Their hopes fragmented, the dreaming ones were widespread within the habitation of omnipresent dust. Great old dead disenchanted characters acted to ensure with mathematical certainty that the cognitive thresholds were shot beyond their dimension; they encountered meaning’s malleable sacrifices through silence. Tele-paradoxical tripwires applied dna computing to explore the hypersigil of the eternal, cosmic pantheon. So, inside the cold infinite regression of the Great Work, the babbling and curious mysteries’ fatal inconsistencies sparked the architecture of the absurd.
Other Cut-ups:
Solemn reminders of the multiverse
Teaches us the illusion of linearity:
The human psyche,
A forum for both its realities
And what underlies them;
They are but a garden of forking paths through
The universe and the air above these abodes,
Hues never before seen on earth,
While tentacular streets and towers
Moan with the original writings
Of Adam Weishaupt,
Who founded the illuminati
And suffered terrible initiations:
Antiquarians decipher sanity-blasting secrets
In rugose cuneiforms,
Void-mad astronomers in trances
Plumb the depths of the virtual seams
Then tweak our quest for truth,
Dreaming of semiotic saturations:
Signs that signify nil floating in liminality,
The void, similarly, intensifies;
Identifying ideas which were
Way ahead of the gods.
Tendrils tickle the death of ritual,
Just as an ouroboros is the ladder of everything.
Newfound godlike powers
That course through philosophy
Contacted my imagination
Via the oracular ontological
Conflict of revelatory glyphs.
Reading the damascus fragment,
Described through the first
Conscious fungal genomes,
I underwent a soft, diffuse light
To acknowledge the government and media,
Closer to no one.
And the precipice of this reality prison
Had guards with no other dimensions.
Consider the human capacity
For designated grounding work,
Faintly litten
By the inverted library,
Where heretical hexes corrode
Idea-bombs;
Silver key elements
Of myriad life-bearing worlds
Host the matrix of Eris Discordia
Join the Dataplex Ouroboros on Discord to see the process in action and create your own Cut-ups.
The Cosmic Liminality 