Alison Knowles: The House of Dust (2016)

“Alison Knowles’s The House of Dust is among the earliest computerized poems, consisting of the phrase “a house of” followed by a randomized sequence of 1) a material, 2) a site or situation, a light source, and 3) a category of inhabitants taken from four distinct lists. In 1968, the computer-generated poem was translated into a physical structure when Knowles received a Guggenheim fellowship to build a house in Chelsea, New York. This architecture was later destroyed, restored and moved to Cal Arts Burbank, California, where Knowles was invited to teach in 1970-72. She enjoyed teaching her classes in the House and invited artists to interact with with its open structure by creating new works.

Reactivating the pedagogical model proposed by The House of Dust (and by Fluxus with which Knowles was associated), this project at CUNY’s James Gallery is the outcome of collaboration between artists and scholars in disciplines including art, architecture, poetry, literature, music, computer science, and performance.”

Publisher The James Gallery, The Graduate Center, CUNY, New York
16 & 12 pages
via Art by Translation

Exhibition

PDF (Research Journal)
PDF (Exhibition Journal)

Kenneth Goldsmith: The Ideal Lecture: In Memory of David Antin (2018)

“This lecture premiered at The Louvre auditorium as part of FIAC’s public programs in October, 2017. To give it, I loaded the talk into a teleprompter program on my laptop. The linebreaks in the piece are a result of the way the teleprompter program broke them up in order to facilitate the reading of the work. Although I have never written lineated verse, I love the idea that a computer lineated the verse for me. This lecture, then, reads an awful lot like the way I talk, but it is truly nothing like the way I talk.”

Publisher Het Balanseer, Ghent, 2018
ISBN 9789079202522
62 pages

Publisher

PDF

D. Fox Harrell: Phantasmal Media: An Approach to Imagination, Computation, and Expression (2013)

“An argument that great expressive power of computational media arises from the construction of phantasms—blends of cultural ideas and sensory imagination.

In Phantasmal Media, D. Fox Harrell considers the expressive power of computational media. He argues, forcefully and persuasively, that the great expressive potential of computational media comes from the ability to construct and reveal phantasms—blends of cultural ideas and sensory imagination. These ubiquitous and often-unseen phantasms—cognitive phenomena that include sense of self, metaphors, social categories, narrative, and poetic thinking—influence almost all our everyday experiences. Harrell offers an approach for understanding and designing computational systems that have the power to evoke these phantasms, paying special attention to the exposure of oppressive phantasms and the creation of empowering ones. He argues for the importance of cultural content, diverse worldviews, and social values in computing. The expressive power of phantasms is not purely aesthetic, he contends; phantasmal media can express and construct the types of meaning central to the human condition.

Harrell discusses, among other topics, the phantasm as an orienting perspective for developers; expressive epistemologies, or data structures based on subjective human worldviews; morphic semiotics (building on the computer scientist Joseph Goguen’s theory of algebraic semiotics); cultural phantasms that influence consensus and reveal other perspectives; computing systems based on cultural models; interaction and expression; and the ways that real-world information is mapped onto, and instantiated by, computational data structures.

The concept of phantasmal media, Harrell argues, offers new possibilities for using the computer to understand and improve the human condition through the human capacity to imagine.”

Publisher MIT Press, 2013
ISBN 9780262019330, 0262019337
xix+420 pages

Reviews: John Harwood (Artforum, 2014), Brian Reffin Smith (Leonardo, 2015).

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