The House of Dust (1967) is a computer-generated poem by Alison Knowles (1933, New York) created with the assistance of the composer James Tenney on a Siemens 4004 mainframe computer. Knowles supplied the logic for the poem by providing four lists of words and short sentences to create quatrains, each beginning with ‘a house of’, followed by attributes: its materials, its geographical location, its exposure to light and its inhabitants. Using the computer programming language FORTRAN IV, Tenney programmed the machine to generate quatrains of the poem, finding that it could run four hundred stanzas before a repetition occurred. Here the poem is generated and printed by a dot matrix printer in real time. Different iterations of the work have included public artworks and happenings or events. In 1968, the artist translated the quatrain ‘a house of plastic, in a metropolis, using natural light, inhabited by people from all walks of life’ into a physical structure built in Chelsea, New York and subsequently at California Institute of the Arts (1970–72). The poem was subsequently distributed over the house from a helicopter during a Poem Drop event in 1971.