Katherine Parrish

Alison Knowles: George, couldn’t we extend the scale further and
have a whole city as the contents of a book? Huge pages as the side
of an office building, a single page with water pouring down the
front in the park, a page out flat as bridge, as door to the city?

George Quasha: I’ve dreamt of such a city all my life, the house or
castle with a vast interior. In the transvironmental city one travels to
the depths of inside while extending the roads and gardens of
outside. It’s all one transrupting surface where anything leads to
anything else, governed only by imaginal necessities. The book is
the instrument by which we tap in on the reading that produced it.
We not only could read it, we live in it. Our limbs leave invisible
pollen on the pages for the next readers.

Quasha, George (1996) “Auto-Dialogue on the Transvironmental Book:
Reflections on the Book of the Bean”, in Rothenberg, Jerome &
Guss, David (eds.) The Book, Spiritual Instrument.

It became very clear to me, after just thumbing through LillIan-Yvonne Bertram and Nick Montfort’s excellent book, OUTPUT- Computer Generated Text, 1953 – 2023, that each entry was going to lead me down a curiouser and curiouser rabbit hole, even with works and artists with which I’ve had a passing familiarity.

I started in the poetry section, and was delighted to learn about Alison Knowles’ House of Dust, which began in 1967 as a computer generated poem. (I also realized very quickly that if I spent time and energy exclaiming, “How did I not know about this?” I would have nothing left over to be able to explore and enjoy the works!) Each quatrain of the poem begins with “A house of . . .” completed by a randomly chosen material. The next line described the location andor weather conditions. For the third line, there are only 4 possibilities:

using electricity
using candles
using natural light
using all available lighting

The final line describes the inhabitants of the house.

Alison Knowles pushed this work further, and built the house!

In 1969, Knowles translated one of the quatrains into an
architectural form, a “house”, which was installed first in
Chelsea and then at CalArts in Los Angeles, where she was a
professor from 1970 to 1972. At CalArts, the house became
the focus of a burgeoning community of experimental artists
and students, including Allan Kaprow, Emmett Williams,
Charlemagne Palestine, Dick Higgins, Simone Forti, and Matt
Mullican. Knowles taught classes in The House of Dust and
used the structure as a platform for hosting performances,
concerts, poetry courses, and film screenings, provoking
numerous responses by other artists. Using another computer
program, she produced random combinations of a colour, a
cardinal direction, and a number to “activate” and transform
the house and its surroundings. For example, a student chose
to interpret Knowles’ score by parking his yellow car beside
the house, each day facing a different direction. Knowles her-
self performed the combination “99/red/north” by aligning
99 red apples in a line pointing north and inviting passers-by
to take them in exchange for other objects.

https://fonderiedarling.org/depliant%20house%20of%20dust%20complet%20EN.pdf

Oh, to live and work in the house that Alison Knowles built!

But in this idea of text that builds worlds, computer generated text no less, Knowles is almost freakishly prescient. For what is cyberspace but worlds constructed of computer generated text?