Some Thoughts on Cut-Up

Cut-ups are done by taking magazines, newspapers, personal writings, etc. and totally reassembling them. As far as I can tell there is no set technique for doing this; some cut pages into blocks and randomly assemble them, others search for specific lines and thoughts which they order in such a way as to create something new. The "author" could approach this with no vision for the finished product at all, only randomly taking and pasting parts, or he might take a more active role in selecting and ordering, even inserting or changing the text to a certain degree.
As I see it, Cut-ups are a strange concept which somehow manages nonetheless to construct an original product. How this is possible when using only other people's work, I'm not really sure. There almost seems to be some magical moment, between the cutting and the gluing, where the Muses breath life into the Cut-up and it begins to stand and walk on its own. I don't know exactly how Cut-ups have been used in the past but I think they have a lot of potential. I don't necessarily think a traditional book could survive a Cut-up, but I think there are certainly other areas that might be interesting to experiment with. I wonder how far the Cut-up method has been taken; into photography, film, art?
My Cut-up is below. I took all the parts from the November 16th, 2007 edition of the Isthmus. The first version is what I imagine a cut-up would look like if you were to unknowingly encounter it. As you read, ask yourself whether you could believe it had been intentionally written word-for-word like it is now. The second one I have color-coded to each article I borrowed from. I just include it because it may be fun to check your suspicions against.