The Radical Cut-Up Reader: No Single Narrative

The Radical Cut-Up Master of Fine Arts and Design program directed by Lukas Feireiss at Sandberg Instituut, Amsterdam examined the topical phenomenon of the cut-up as the contemporary mode of creativity and dominant global model of cultural production today. Assembled from photocopies of the Radical Cut-Up Master theses, the book at hand is a cut-up in its own right. With various professional, personal and cultural backgrounds and experiences working in a diverse range of media, participants in the Radical Cut-Up program were encouraged to actively investigate the epistemological surplus of the cut-up, which here serves as a container for a long list of terms and actions, as a disruptive cultural and
narrative tool that extends and reinterprets preceding storylines and embraces – rather than avoids – contradiction. Against this backdrop, the participants had the explicit prerogative to combine, create and copy and challenge each other to question deeply entrenched, classical notions of aesthetic purity, originality and autonomy.