Alison Knowles’s computer-generated poem and sculpture, A House of Dust, created in association with James Tenney and generally considered to be the first computer-generated poem, had its beginnings at an informal Fluxus seminar in 1967 in which Tenney, who had been a composer-in-residence at Bell Labs in the early ’60s, demonstrated how the Fortran programming language could be employed in chance operations in artmaking. Knowles’s contribution to the session was a poem of the following structure—

a house of (list material) (list location) (list light source) (list inhabitants)

—in which combinations of the variables were randomly generated.