Slumber was a multi-year gallery installation/performance by artist Janine Antoni. From the website description: Performance with loom, yarn, bed, nightgown, EEG Machine and artist’s REM reading. Antoni transforms the fleeting act of dreaming into a sculptural process. Between 1994 and 2000, the artist slept in the bed while an electroencephalograph machine recorded her eye movement. During the day, Antoni would sit at the loom and weave shreds of her nightgown in the pattern of her REM. The […]
2013 – Temperature Scarves and Afghans
On January 2013, Kristen Cooper Nutbrown from British Columbia had the idea to create a temperature scarf by knitting one row every day using a color that encodes the temperature of the day. At the end of the year, the scarf visualized local temperature readings for the whole year. Soon after Kristen pitched her idea, Arlene Cline, also from British Columbia, started to create a temperature afghan (a blanket of knitted or crocheted wool). Temperature scarves and afghans became quite popular in […]
2013 – Punchcard Economy: Data Knitting
Punchcard Economy is a machine-knitted tapestry inspired by a 1856 banner advertising the Eight-hour day movement. The layer of visual noise shows today's departure from the eight-hour day philosophy. Working hours were collected from 116 participants, and each hour of work outside normal working hours was encoded as a color-inverted knit. A smaller version was made for the 2014 Data as Culture exhibition. Sources: Sam Meech (2013) Punchcard Economy. Explanation of the data encoding in this […]
2014 – Data Clothing: Dresses Show Air Pollution
Laura Perovich explored the concept of data-driven clothes as part of her Master thesis at the MIT Media Lab. The fashion dresses above show the concentrations of 100 chemical contaminants measured in the air of a particular household (left image). Chemicals are mapped to small squares and relative concentration is mapped to square size. Squares are repeated to create lace patterns (right image shows the concentration of several factory-related pollutants). In her thesis Laura Perovich […]
2016 – Accomplishments
Accomplishments is an exploration of personal data tracking, wearable art, wearable technology, social media, and data physicalization. Each day accomplishments were tracked, first on paper then by sewing spheroid masses onto a dress worn for four months. By hand sewing each accomplishment onto this dress, they became a part of the wearer's physical presence and identity. The work juxtaposes the immediateness of social media posts, and the separate identity we create for ourselves online which […]
2018 – Anthropocene Footprints
Handmade physicalizations of Canada's greenhouse gas emissions, by Mieka West and Sheelagh Carpendale. Each object represents data from a specific year (1990, 2010, and projections to 2030). Initially meant to be smog masks, the designs evolved into strange and beautiful objects evoking indigeneous artefacts such as Native American dreamcatchers, Inca quipus and Polynesian genealogical instruments, and whose visual and material complexity is reminiscent of Nathalie Miebach’s Woven Sculptures. […]
2019 – Sleep Blanket
A visualization of my son's sleep pattern from birth to his first birthday. Crochet border surrounding a double knit body. Each row represents a single day. Each stitch represents 6 minutes of time spent awake or asleep. Also see our entry 2013 – Temperature Scarves and Afghans. Source: Seung Lee (2019) Twitter thread.
2019 – Self Knitted Scarf of Train Delays
The mother [of] Sara Weber knitted this scarf during her daily train rides to work in Munich and used different colors depending on train delays. Every day two rows: Grey, less than 5 minutes delay. Pink, 5 to 30 minutes delay. Red, both rides delayed or one more than 30 minutes. The huge red area was during construction work, where the train was substituted by a bus. Side note: The tweet went viral and at the end she sold the scarf at eBay and gave the money to the "Bahnhofsmission" who take […]