{"id":1473,"date":"2006-09-27T09:47:50","date_gmt":"2006-09-27T16:47:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/wp\/2006\/09\/take_two_bill_burroughs_tony_b\/"},"modified":"2013-10-01T13:28:49","modified_gmt":"2013-10-01T17:28:49","slug":"take_two_bill_burroughs_tony_b","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/2006\/09\/take_two_bill_burroughs_tony_b.html","title":{"rendered":"TAKE TWO: BILL BURROUGHS & TONY BALCH"},"content":{"rendered":"

Here’s one you won’t find on YouTube<\/a>. RealityStudio<\/a> just posted it. William S. Burroughs, filmmaker Antony Balch and I made it 35 years ago in Burroughs’s London flat. It was an experiment, primitive yet precise, in a particular shape-shifting technique.<\/p>\n

Coincidentally, RealityStudio has also posted an overview<\/a> of an international symposium about William S. Burroughs, recently held in Mexico City. Jorge Cuevas Cid reports that one of the scholars, Katharine Streip, offered “a really helpful paper” (entitled “Cut-Ups and Sampling”) about Burroughs’s “cut-up experiments with tape recorders” and his use of “radical fragmentation which, like many other avant-garde experiments, is often labelled as ‘unreadable'” on the page.<\/p>\n

“Among other things,” Cid writes, “she remarked [on] Burroughs’s awareness that reproduction technologies could make sense of what in a piece of paper was seemingly senseless. She also stressed the function of cut-ups to destabilize identity, as contemporary media have shown us.”<\/p>\n

Exactly. Back in 1971, I was using an Akai video camera and portable recorder with 1\/4″ black-and-white tape (a medium now so obsolete it’s not even remembered, let alone contemporary). I don’t know how the video will look to others, especially given the magnetic degradation of the tape after so many years in storage.<\/p>\n

But as I’ve written in an explanatory note for RealityStudio, it still “gives the fantastic impression of a ventriloquist dummy coming to life or an ancient Egyptian mummy being revived to cheer the river gods. I think Bill got a kick out of that and the demonstration of how easy it was, even with primitive means, to create a televised witch’s brew” for propaganda and disinformation.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Here’s one you won’t find on YouTube. RealityStudio just posted it. William S. Burroughs, filmmaker Antony Balch and I made it 35 years ago in Burroughs’s London flat. It was an experiment, primitive yet precise, in a particular shape-shifting technique. Coincidentally, RealityStudio has also posted an overview of an international symposium about William S. Burroughs, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-1473","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-main","7":"entry"},"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pbvgEs-nL","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1473","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1473"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1473\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1473"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1473"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1473"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}