Enter CUCI (cut-up / code-in) is primarily an experiment in language and programming. Individual word-units are at the meme mercy of systematic thesaurus look-ups in a fashion similar to the 'human' process. Whereas softmachines are prejudiced, the logic-board is not. I thought how interesting it was that when you write a text message, the predictive engine sometimes arrives at a word pertinent to the content while not the one you were looking for. I since had read a lot of William Burroughs and became interested in the cut-up / fold-in techniques he and other authors had used to add a certain unpredictability to their narratives. A process that added, removed and warped meaning, creating 'new' structures otherwise outside of the typical writing process. There is no correct diction. Through Project Gutenberg, I aquired a copyright free thesaurus (Roget's American). A single 24mb ascii file (over 650,000 words) that was composed in a way that data could later be usefully extracted from it. That data was re-edited into a form in which it could be accessed through a database structure. This was designed so that words associated with another could be found. If one looked for 'share', one could find something like 'go-halves'. Realising early on that I was making use of opensource, copyleft and free tools (Python, PHP, Project Gutenberg) I decided to use typefaces of the same ilk: Gentium, a serif for display, and Pigiarniq a sans-serif for small text. In this sense, it is a testament to the benefit of sharing resources and what can be done with it, while also an experiment in language that sets up certain questions: How far can language be systemised if at all? What is the validity of writers using tools such as this? At what point is meaning completely lost? and many more. --- luke [at] aa-nn-dd.com www.gutenberg.org www.python.org www.php.net www.tiro.com www.sil.org/~gaultney/gentium/ Luke Prowse | Marcus Leis Allion