Brion Gysin introduced William S. Burroughs to the cut-up technique in the late 1950s.
Gysin was an English artist, writer, and performer who experimented with rearranging fragments of existing text. In 1959, while staying at the Beat Hotel in Paris, he showed Burroughs how to cut pages into sections and recombine them to generate unexpected sequences.
Burroughs adapted the method extensively in his writing. The technique became central to works such as The Soft Machine, The Ticket That Exploded, and Nova Express. Burroughs and Gysin also collaborated on visual and sound experiments, making the cut-up method part of a wider artistic practice rather than merely a novelist’s trick.
The method was not invented from nothing in Paris: earlier literary experiments, including Dadaist procedures, had explored chance and rearrangement. Gysin’s importance was bringing the approach directly into Burroughs’s working process.