User:Thijshijsijsjss/Gossamery/The House of Dust

• Read about it here on the bootleg library
• Recommended by Manetta, 2024-09-16 (first prototyping class of the year, after making a prototype for a small card game / collaborative story building game)

The House of Dust is an elvolving generative artwork by Alison Knowles. Originally, it is a computer generated poem, that was later turned into multiple architectural realisations deployed in several locations, each change in location transforming the work.

Art by Translation have published two texts concerned with The House of Dust, one being an exploration of the project from the perspective of translation, and the other archival and reconstructing its history. The former includes essays, for example one by Hannah B. Higgins that is also included as Chapter 12 of Mainframe Experimentalism.

Poetry in Translation

This text, published in 2016 by Art in Translation, attempts to reflect on Alison Knowles's project The House of Dust and situate it in the context of translation in art. A summary:

This text stresses "The House of Dust is not only a poem, but also an interpretable score". It is an attempt to disrupt the Logos of the time: the rising prominence of computers, amidst scientific rationality ruled by mathematics, logic and structure. This was seen in translation, too: language was reduced to a utalitarian fantasy of communicating without ambiguity, and thus removing interpretation. The House of Dust opposes this idea, by using the computer not to achieve transparancy, but rather to add another layer of interpretability.

The story of the tower of Babel reveals a relationship between language and architecture, one that Derrida tried to deconstruct already. Through a different approach, Knowles does the same. The poems are realised into actual 'houses'. Moreover, as these houses change location, they are adapted to their new environment, defying and deconstructing the 'computer's logic' even further.

Another connection to Derrida is made. He said that translation should not aim to reflect the original, but rather to augment it. In Knowles work, we can see the physical as augmentations of the textual. A process of dissemination. This can be seen in more of her works, too. In fact, the text makes clear we shouldn't view The House of Dust in isolation -- it is closely connected to other works of Knowles the many projects it spawned.

(essay by hannah B. Higgins)

(essay by Benjamin H.D. Buchloh)

(essay by Janet Sarbanes)

(reading in progress)

the House of Dust archives

TBA