Reframing the House of Dust: A Meditation in Many Parts will chronicle the building of a public sculpture on the CalArts campus by faculty and students in response to Fluxus artist Alison Knowles’s “House of Dust,” which was inspired by a computer-generated poem and sited at CalArts from 1970-72. The essay will consist of a series of journal entries meditating on the process of designing, constructing and activating the new house; Knowles’s original process; the history of Fluxus pedagogy at CalArts and its lasting influence; and questions around art and cybernetics and artists and housing raised by both projects.
Janet Sarbanes teaches at the School of Critical Studies at the California Institute of the Arts in the M.A. in Aesthetics and Politics and the MFA in Creative Writing programs. Sarbanes has published in museum catalogues, anthologies, and journals such as East of Borneo, Afterall, and the Journal of Utopian Studies. She is the recipient of the Eugenio Battisti Prize for Best Essay in Utopian Studies. She is also the author of the short story collection Army of One (Otis Press 2008) and a collection of short fiction, The Protester Has Been Released (C&R Press, 2017). Recent stories appear in Black Clock, North Dakota Quarterly, Entropy, and the Los Angeles Review of Books.