Generative Art Timeline · Chapter 4: Digital Era (1960s)

1967

The House of Dust by Alison Knowles

Artwork · North America · Top Moment · Women Artists

A long sheet of striped continuous-feed paper carries successive four-line computer-generated descriptions of houses.
Alison Knowles, The House of Dust, 1966–1968. Computer-generated poem printout in the ZKM collection. © Alison Knowles; photograph © ZKM | Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe / ONUK. Image source.

Having collaborated with the likes of John Cage and Marcel Duchamp, Fluxus poet Alison Knowles teams up with composer James Tenney to write The House of Dust – one of the earliest computer-generated poems, dated 1966 to 1968 by ZKM. The text begins as a set of four lists written by Knowles, which are then generated into quatrains via a program written by Tenney using FORTRAN on an IBM computer.

-Sasha Stiles

Read Le Random’s article about Knowles’s House of Dust, “Generations of Verse.”

Image: © Alison Knowles; photo © ZKM | Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe, photo: ONUK

Text by Peter Bauman. Generative Art Timeline, Le Random.

Sources

People

Alison Knowles, James Tenney, John Cage, Marcel Duchamp, Sasha Stiles

Movements

Computer Text, Fluxus, Generative Poetry

Filed under

Ideas
collaboration, Computer Text, Generative Poetry, poetry
Technologies
Fortran
People
Alison Knowles, James Tenney, John Cage, Marcel Duchamp, Sasha Stiles
Works
The House of Dust
Organisations
Fluxus, IBM, Verse

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