"2 < n < infinity": A Multilayered "Phyllo Dough of the Analog and the Digital" in Alison Knowles and James Tenney's The House of Dust

Abstract

Abstract: One of the stanzas in Alison Knowles and James Tenney's computer-generated poem "The House of Dust" suggests a sense of a shiny, metallic, unevenly reflective enclosure, filled with light characteristic of the desert environment, and yet one that somehow shelters both aquatic and avian species: "A HOUSE OF TIN / IN A DESERT / USING NATURAL LIGHT / INHABITED BY VARIOUS BIRDS AND FISH." One distinct mood, one world of atmospheric and affective effects opens up here through the specific juxtapositions of entities and materials. Following Eve Sedgwick's sense, in her book Touching Feeling , of an intimacy that "seems to subsist between textures and emotions," this essay enumerates the affective qualities generated through patterns of recombination that structure "The House of Dust." Seen through the lens of cybernetics and affect theory this early computer-generated poem offers an interesting example of the complex layering of the analogue and the digital, as it translates between the binary code of early computer languages and the discrete, analogue properties of specific configurations of materials and the concomitant affective states they evoke. As such, the poem and the concomitant performances it has generated over time in which aspects of the poem were frequently recreated out of elements of the material universe complicate any kind of a binary relationship between the analogue and digital, materiality and code, or even original creation and reception.