Combination planting—where certain crops are planted together to stave off pests or enhance taste—is as old as farming itself. But up until recently, it’s been difficult to be precise about where and how different crops can benefit from each other. Benedikt Groß, a UK-based interaction designer, is using algorithmic processing to improve on a practice that’s thousands of years old.
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If knitting is the domain of needles, yarn and sewing machines, then a digital fabrication project based in Tokyo wants to add ‘data glitches’ to that list. Fusing fashion with technology, Glitch Knit uses a method called “Glitch Embroidery’ to “sew” custom fabrics and knitted items like scarves with a slight difference.
Instead of neat rows of carefully knitted stitches, Glitch Embroidery is based on the idea of using intentionally damaged data to cause errant needle movements. What results are fabrics that visually and physically represent otherwise intangible glitches in data. Created by fashion designer Nukeme , Glitch Knit is inspired by a growing number of experiments that are fusing traditional crafts with computing and was one of the Jury Selections at the 2013 Media Arts festival in Tokyo.
A Brother KH-930e knitting machine is “hacked” using an Arduino Duo so that it can be connected to a computer. This process enables the knitting machine to turn any digital image or pattern, even those created in graphics programs like Photoshop or Paint, into a knitted fabric.
Nukeme then uses a hex editor to open up the raw binary data of an image and purposely damages the image by rewriting the data.
The image is then opened in a program which allows the user to resize their glitched image and send it to the knitting machine to be turned into fabric.
The bottom half of the image below is glitch, the top half is the original image.
The glitch fabric being knitted.
Glitch Knit is an interesting way of physically exploring and representing errors in data that we usually only encounter as malfunctioning software or frustrating experiences. By purposely centering the design of the fabric around glitches, Glitch Knit playfully subverts the way we respond to errors that occur in the data-saturated world around us.
Glitch Knit is a project supported by Shibuya Fab Lab and was created by Nukeme, Tomofumi Yoshida and uses software made with Processing by So Kanno,
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