Go to SmashMyBooksUp.com or LibrarySupercollider.com
In 1959, William S. Burroughs took a pair of scissors to a page of text, rearranged the pieces, and taped them back together. His argument was that linear language was a control system — that by cutting it up, you could slip between the lines and find what was actually being said. Library Supercollider is the logical conclusion of that idea, scaled to over 10,000 books from the Project Gutenberg archives. CERN could never imagine.
Pick any two public domain texts and collide them. The engine samples a selection of pages and forces two authors who never met into a shared narrative space they never consented to. How it’s taped back together is up to you:
- Paragraph level: Preserves some structural dignity.
- Sentence level: Grammar survives, but sequence does not.
- Word level: Sweet, nonsensical poetry.
A source tracking mode colour-codes the wreckage by origin, in case you need to know who to blame for a particular sentence. The interface is intentionally a slot machine, and what emerges is not literature, exactly. It is also not not literature — which puts it in good company with many award-winning books! Burroughs believed the cut-up revealed hidden structures beneath the surface of language. Library Supercollider gives you the tools to find them for yourself.
And just because I had some time and Veo credits to spare, I thought I’d try my hand at making an over-the-top video ad to show it in motion on social media. Which meant a portrait video. Definitely stepping out of my comfort zone here.
Disclaimer: I made Library Supercollider with the help of Google’s Gemini 3/3.1 Pro LLM. The authors of Project Gutenberg’s texts were not consulted, but they are hardly in a position to object.
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