In the early 1960s in New York City, the electronic composer James Tenney held a series of seminars on the offices of the Something Else Press. Working by day in the sound department of Bell Labs in New Jersey, Tenney was tuned in to the emerging capabilities of FORTRAN, a programming language, for artists. Artists programmed early computer music, graphics and poetry using Bell Labs mainframes with Tenney's inspired guidance. One of these projects, by Fluxus artist Alison Knowles, is called the House of Dust, and resulted in a 2000 long sequence of iterative quatrains. The program for the house continues to inspire experiments in architecture, poetry, performance and sound. This lecture introduces the seminar and its many outcomes and the House of Dust and its many materials.