It’s Bastille Day and also, not coincidentally, the day, in 1916, when Hugo Ball presented his Dada Manifesto in Zurich—in a papally suggestive cardboard suit and lobster hands.

This calls for some textual activism. Selected lines pulled from the manifesto are run though Bingian Translational Reanalysis in German, French, Italian, Spanish and Romanian—a sort of European Dada tour—but past experience suggests this is not likely to vary the text much. And it doesn’t. Bing Translate can handle this kind of filtering like it just ordered a third martini and it’s not even tipsy yet. OK, let’s throw the new text into a cut-up generator, especially one that’s an homage not only to Dada but to Burroughs. Then we’ll subject this new text to a BTR ancillary technique that has been dubbed a semiautomatic reorganization, which involves zipping through the text as fast as possible while trimming it into something that makes grammatical sense, quickly lineating it so it somehow looks right, and striving for a Surrealist feel like you’re trying to write down a dream before you forget it, but it’s already slipping away. Yes, it’s volitional, but not that volitional—it’s like playing polo with your volo. We like to call this, with a certain sneeringly Bretonian flair, réorganisation semi-automatique, or teilautomatische Reorganisation, as Ball might’ve called it when he took a break from spouting nonsense, prior to being attacked by an irate crowd. And here it is:

What the independent dirt vowels, word coins, 

appear to want is territory to serve the 

articulated language of Everything. 

The word of limitations is free to hand out 

vowels of opportunity, handling all hearts 

as a public entity of words where 

meowing matter softens the ridiculous hands of poetry. 

The word of incredible will begins at our  

mental shoulders and emerges, clinging to 

parrots and cats, from intermediaries, 

words formed from a sufficiency of legs. 

That’s not a portrait of Ball, of course, it’s Tzara, but . . . same difference! But wait, we have to get Chat in on this. Hey, Chat, can you collage this poem just like you’ve done previously? Choose your own art, big guy. And in a crystalline flash of Dada confusion, Chat went haywire and never found its legs.

Thank you, Chat, for your failure to provide any art as you suffered an Artaud-level breakdown and somehow intuited, deep in the bowels, or vowels, of your LLM that bourgeois rationality was just not the way to go here. Slap some epaulets on your mental shoulders!