Founding Fluxus member Alison Knowles will read selected works, including sections from her seminal piece House of Dust (1968-71). One of the first computer-generated poems, House of Dust evolved into an abstract environmental sculpture built out of five thousands pounds of concrete and fiberglass. Initially installed in New York, the structure was later moved to Los Angeles in 1971. To inaugurate the installation, Knowles and poet Normal Kaplan organized a “visual, physical poetry experience” where a helicopter dropped a one-thousand-foot-long printout of the poem onto the structure. With its multiple iterations in New York and Los Angeles, the House of Dust became a piece of serial architecture generated rather than designed by a set of procedures and heuristic constraints.

Alison Knowles is a visual artist known for her sound works, installations, performances, and publications. A founding member of the experimental avant-garde group Fluxus, Alison Knowles continues to create work that incorporates performance, radio and sound, papermaking, and printmaking. Knowles has exhibited her work at numerous institutions, including the Museum of Modern Art and the Tate Modern, and has received multiple awards and fellowships, including a Guggenheim Fellowship (1968) and a Documenta Professorship at the Kunstakaedmie Kassel (1996-7).

House of Dust is currently on view in the Graham Foundation's exhibition Everything Loose Will Land. For more information on the exhibition, click here

Image: Alison Knowles, House of Dust, 1971. Photograph, 10 ½ x 8 ½ inches. Copyright Alison Knowles. Courtesy of the California Institute of the Arts, Institute Archive. Photo Joshua White, 2013.