Alison Knowles’ House of Dust

The Fluxus movement is an international and interdisciplinary group of artists, composers, designers and poets that took shape in the 1960s and 1970s. The body of work produced included performance events, such as enactments of scores, "Neo-Dada" noise music, concrete poetry, visual art, architecture, design, literature, and publishing. Many Fluxus artists share an anti-commercial and anti-art sensibility using improvisation and prompts to complete works.

In 1967, the Fluxist artist Alison Knowles created a poetry project generated by the Siemens 4004 computer titled “The House of Dust”, with the help of James Tenney. Knowles produced four word lists that were then translated into computer language and organized into “quatrains” according to a random matrix. Each of the four lists contained terms that describe the attributes of a structure and its environment: a house of (list material) (list location) (list light source) (list inhabitants). All variations of the poem together totaled more than 10,000 quatrain possibilities. The computer program imposed a non-rational ordering of subjects and ideas, generating unexpectedly humorous phrasing and imagery. The poem was printed on perforated tractor-feed paper common to dot matrix printers of the time, the pages forming of a long scroll.

In 1968, the computer-generated poem was translated into a physical structure when Knowles received a Guggenheim fellowship to build a house in Chelsea, New York. She referred to it as “A house of dust, on open ground, lit by natural light, inhabited by friends and enemies”. This structure was later transported to CalArts in California, where Knowles was invited to teach in 1970-72. She taught her classes in the House of Dust and invited artists to interact with its open structure while creating new works. As a Fluxus piece, the House of Dust acted as a space for events to happen in the form of performance, art, music, readings and activities. All activated by prompts that encouraged improvisation, a prominent trait of the Fluxus movement. One of the most infamous happenings at the House of Dust was the event of the printed computer-generated poem falling from a helicopter in the sky.

To this day, The House of Dust is considered to be an early example of computerized poetry that plays on the unlimited possibilities of the random juxtapositions of words, and art making through the systems of technology and the possibilities of chance.  Knowles’s collaboration with the computer highlights the underlying arbitrariness of language, demonstrating how words acquire different meanings through structural relationships and shifting contexts.