Brion Gysin

Brion Gysin (1916–1986) was a Canadian artist, painter, and writer whose experiments with language, chance, and perception — conducted primarily in Tangier and Paris — made him one of the most original and influential figures of the postwar avant-garde. Born in Taplow, England to a Canadian mother and a Swiss-German father, he spent much of his artistic life in Tangier's international zone and in Paris.

His most significant invention was the cut-up technique — the practice of literally cutting up texts and rearranging the fragments to produce new textual combinations — which he developed with William S. Burroughs in the late 1950s.