FOR 40 YEARS
The IRC is celebrating our founding vision where the future of computers will one day be ubiquitous and their creative power will be in the hands of everyone. Today more than ever, the IRC brings together students, faculty, and researchers across disciplines to collaborate on projects spanning industry, scholarship, and the creative fields.
To celebrate we will have a series of public events, exhibitions, and panels in Spring 2027 focusing on historical projects that expand the definition of media at the IRC, UMBC and the world.
EXHIBITION
Alison Knowles: The House of Dust
January 26 – May 23, 2027
AOK Library Gallery
Performance and exhibit Reception – March 4, 6:00 p.m.
Public Programming dates [TBA]
Alison Knowles: The House of Dust will advance our understanding of a post-war artist whose work has been shaped by her innovations in chance, systems, participation, language, and social practice. The exhibition will present The House of Dust, the groundbreaking computerized poem Knowles developed with James Tenney at Bell Labs in 1967, as a live, open-ended printing of its inherently generative permutations on green and white paper.
The poem was subsequently realized as a social sculpture in Burbank, California, in 1971. A historically accurate, life-size augmented reality [AR] reconstruction of the Burbank House of Dust, [approximately 15x18x5′]. Gallery visitors will be offered AR glasses and an opportunity to experience the social sculpture, to scale, as it was in 1971. The completed virtual The House of Dust social sculpture will be permanently archived in the AOK Gallery and Archive as a resource for scholars, artists, curators, and students.
For 25 years, the Albin O. Kuhn Gallery & Archive has been home to the Dick Higgins Collection at UMBC. The project is curated by Lisa Moren, Director of the Imaging Research Center (IRC), Professor of Visual Art who acquired the original Higgins Collection. For decades, the Collection has worked to preserve and disseminate this history through exhibitions, publications, performances, teaching, and research. The Collection includes over a thousand prints, folios, books, Fluxkits, audio recordings, “unnamables,” and other materials documenting the artistic practice of Alison Knowles.
The exhibition will include rarely displayed archival materials from the Dick Higgins Collection, works from the Knowles estate, including prints, silkscreens, photographs, and related objects. Public programs will include a panel of scholars and artists to examine Knowles’s work and the significance of The House of Dust, and will be recorded and livestreamed through UMBC. The exhibition, a live display of the early computerized poem, an AR reconstruction of the poem’s social sculpture, and scholarly programming will assert UMBC’s historical commitment to an important contribution of postwar American art that influences an expanded definition of media to this day.