A House of Dust by Alison Knowles: the Networked Book Structure as a Technological Dream
Abstract
This article proposes an analysis of Alison Knowles' A House of Dust (1967), as well as of the constructions that, as a “poem in process”, were placed first in New York and then at the CalArts facility in California. This work, in addition to constituting one of the first computergenerated poems in history, becomes interesting in light of the changes that were taking place in the counterculture environment of the time. The ideas underlying the publication Whole Earth Catalog, edited by Stuart Brand, serve to trace a new utopian conception of technology that, adopted by Knowles' artistic milieu, was to lead to the development of the first personal computers. Some aspects of Marshal MacLuhan's media theory will be reviewed, as well as the ideas of Richard Buckminster Fuller, authors whose influence Knowles may have shared with John Cage. The structure of the poem as a decentralized network will also be analyzed.
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