The Voice Knitting Machine was not the only textile-based project presented on the ars electronica Campus this year.
I had a crush on the Clothesline Display for its simplicity, poetry and playfulness. Developed at the Hochschule für Gestaltung und Kunst Institut HyperWerk , the project connects two corner buildings flanking the gateway from the Main Square to the Danube by clotheslines. Together with 250 boxer shorts and some robotics these lines form a spectacular Mediterranean-style matrix display (and a clear one when the wind allowed it.)
More images.
Fabienne Blanc and Patrick Ruegg, from the Institute Industrial Design und Medienkunst der Fachhochschule Nordwestschweiz, Hochschule für Gestaltung und Kunst in Aarau Switzerland, were busy knitting Space Invaders scarves on their Struckmaschine.
You’re invited to swipe your credit card into a card reader, the kind you’d find in supermarkets. Digital data are captured by an entry terminal and then transformed into a binary code that is finally converted into analog form as a graphic pattern dutifully knitted by the machine.
Each scarf produced by the machine is personal.
News Knitter, by Mahir M. Yavuz and Ebru Kurbak from the Interface Cultures at the University of Art and Design Linz, started as a quest for an alternative medium to visualize live data streams. The key motive is to translate digital information into the language of the physical world.
News Knitter is a data visualization project which focuses on knitted garments as an alternative medium to visualize large scale data.
Today, the patterns of knitted garments are designed by individuals generally depending on the current trends of fashion and the intended target markets and multiplied through mass production. News Knitter translates this individual design process into a world-wide collaboration by utilizing live data streams as a base for pattern generation. Due to the dynamic nature of live data streams, the system generates patterns with unpredictable visuality.
News Knitter converts information gathered from the daily political news into clothing. Live news feed from the Internet is analyzed, filtered and converted into a unique visual pattern for a sweater. The system consists of two different types of software: one receives the content from live feeds while the other converts it into visual patterns, and a fully computerized flat knitting machine produces the final output. Each product, sweater of News Knitter is an evidence/result of a specific day or period.
The exhibition consists of ten unique sample sweaters. Their patterns were generated by using online global news of a particular day or local Turkish news of a particular time period.
More images of the knitting projects.