Participatory Environments and The House of Dust: Alison Knowles’s Expanded Publics

This talk reconsiders Fluxus artist Alison Knowles’s The House of Dust (1968) in relation to newer uses of public space in the Vietnam War era. An intermedia work which began as a computational poem, and later translated from its generative text as large-scale installations, Knowles’s experimentation with spatial and linguistic permutations is one of the first instances of merging art and digital technology. The House of Dust was composed by the artist utilizing four separate categories (materials, locations, lighting sources, inhabitants), which were then fed as lists into a mainframe computer at Brooklyn Polytechnic Institute by experimental composer, James Tenney. The lists were subjected to chance and random mixing through the computer’s internal logic, with the refrain following the formulation: “A house of...,” in a series of repeatable quatrains. The results are often fascinatingly absurd, humorous, and evocative (“A house of dust / in a metropolis / using all available lighting / inhabited by friends and enemies”). The themes of multiplicity and chance-based operations are conceptual cores of the complex work, but, so too, I argue, is the poem's capacity for visionary habitation and political engagement. In this way, Knowles's The House of Dust is exemplary of a kind of participatory ecology that emerged in the visual arts in the late 1960s as a broader critique of the technocratic public sphere.