Clear Skies All Week (2011) | Alison Knowles
[Paris]: Onestar Press, 2011. First edition. Softcover in black-and-white printed glossy wraps, with contents printed in black and white. 28 x 22cm. 62 pages. Edition of 250. Near fine with some minor cover wear and creasing to the top right corner; bookseller inscription in pencil on last page.
Alison Knowles’s A House of Dust (ca. 1968), produced in collaboration with James Tenney and a Siemens System 4004, is the holy grail of computer-generated books. Lesser known is its spiritual successor, Clear Skies All Week, which the legendary Fluxus artist produced more than three decades later, in collaboration with computer programmer Adrian Peter Orion Lauf.
Like its predecessor, Clear Skies All Week compiles outputs from a program driven by a combinatorial procedure, this time recombining textual elements from the categories “situations” (28 items), “weather/time” (five items), and “place” (eight items). The resulting poem is an exhaustive unraveling of all 1120 possible combinations of these elements, given the template [situation] [weather/time] [place], which are printed in (mathematical) lexicographic order. As such, each copy of the book includes the same contents, unlike A House of Dust, which is an early example of a book for which each copy is unique.
Though Clear Skies All Week contains no preface or description of the computer program that produced its contents—e.g., the programming language is not identified—the elements composing each textual category are given prior to the poem (though the item “on a peninsula with the ocean on one side and bay on the other” is missing).
While A House of Dust was published in an edition of 500, this piece has only 250 copies, 26 of which were quickly claimed by cultural institutions for their special collections (per OCLC). This striking computer-generated book—by one of the form’s pioneers and most important practitioners, who read computer poetry at the White House—will surely remain difficult to obtain.
This item has been sold.
[Paris]: Onestar Press, 2011. First edition. Softcover in black-and-white printed glossy wraps, with contents printed in black and white. 28 x 22cm. 62 pages. Edition of 250. Near fine with some minor cover wear and creasing to the top right corner; bookseller inscription in pencil on last page.
Alison Knowles’s A House of Dust (ca. 1968), produced in collaboration with James Tenney and a Siemens System 4004, is the holy grail of computer-generated books. Lesser known is its spiritual successor, Clear Skies All Week, which the legendary Fluxus artist produced more than three decades later, in collaboration with computer programmer Adrian Peter Orion Lauf.
Like its predecessor, Clear Skies All Week compiles outputs from a program driven by a combinatorial procedure, this time recombining textual elements from the categories “situations” (28 items), “weather/time” (five items), and “place” (eight items). The resulting poem is an exhaustive unraveling of all 1120 possible combinations of these elements, given the template [situation] [weather/time] [place], which are printed in (mathematical) lexicographic order. As such, each copy of the book includes the same contents, unlike A House of Dust, which is an early example of a book for which each copy is unique.
Though Clear Skies All Week contains no preface or description of the computer program that produced its contents—e.g., the programming language is not identified—the elements composing each textual category are given prior to the poem (though the item “on a peninsula with the ocean on one side and bay on the other” is missing).
While A House of Dust was published in an edition of 500, this piece has only 250 copies, 26 of which were quickly claimed by cultural institutions for their special collections (per OCLC). This striking computer-generated book—by one of the form’s pioneers and most important practitioners, who read computer poetry at the White House—will surely remain difficult to obtain.
This item has been sold.
[Paris]: Onestar Press, 2011. First edition. Softcover in black-and-white printed glossy wraps, with contents printed in black and white. 28 x 22cm. 62 pages. Edition of 250. Near fine with some minor cover wear and creasing to the top right corner; bookseller inscription in pencil on last page.
Alison Knowles’s A House of Dust (ca. 1968), produced in collaboration with James Tenney and a Siemens System 4004, is the holy grail of computer-generated books. Lesser known is its spiritual successor, Clear Skies All Week, which the legendary Fluxus artist produced more than three decades later, in collaboration with computer programmer Adrian Peter Orion Lauf.
Like its predecessor, Clear Skies All Week compiles outputs from a program driven by a combinatorial procedure, this time recombining textual elements from the categories “situations” (28 items), “weather/time” (five items), and “place” (eight items). The resulting poem is an exhaustive unraveling of all 1120 possible combinations of these elements, given the template [situation] [weather/time] [place], which are printed in (mathematical) lexicographic order. As such, each copy of the book includes the same contents, unlike A House of Dust, which is an early example of a book for which each copy is unique.
Though Clear Skies All Week contains no preface or description of the computer program that produced its contents—e.g., the programming language is not identified—the elements composing each textual category are given prior to the poem (though the item “on a peninsula with the ocean on one side and bay on the other” is missing).
While A House of Dust was published in an edition of 500, this piece has only 250 copies, 26 of which were quickly claimed by cultural institutions for their special collections (per OCLC). This striking computer-generated book—by one of the form’s pioneers and most important practitioners, who read computer poetry at the White House—will surely remain difficult to obtain.
This item has been sold.