The House of Dust

IMDb 0.0 2021 • 88 min •

Director

Alison Knowles

Country

Plot Summary

In 1967, Knowles, a Fluxus artist, composed one of the first computerized poems, written in Fortran code, with randomly assembled verses. (An example: “A house of steel / Among high mountains / Using candles / Inhabited by people who sleep almost all the time.”) This significant, jam-packed exhibition revives Knowles’s poem on an old-school dot-matrix printer, and includes related ephemera, including a film by Allan Kaprow. The show also highlights forebears of Knowles’s aleatory composition, with a never-completed book by Mallarmé whose pages could be reordered at will, as well as Marcel Broodthaer’s 1969 homage to it. There are also successors: Nicholas Knight’s intricate paintings of overlapping colored curves were generated by an algorithm, and Katarzyna Krakowiak’s audio piece remixes Knowles’s original poem into skittering musique concrète.

Top Cast

Alison Knowles
Alison Knowles Herself
Jessica Higgins
Jessica Higgins Herself
Joshua Selman
Joshua Selman Himself
Clara Joy
Clara Joy Herself
Andrew Hubert
Andrew Hubert Himself