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 […]

Textile art based on the network maps of Valdis Krebs. Gundega Strautmane, a Latvian textile artist and designer, visualizes social and physical networks in a show called Relational Ornaments. The networks are created using various sized pins to depict nodes and threads connecting them to show relationships. Bringing visualization into the tactile world lends it a weight not able to be achieved on a computer screen. It allows the viewer to pause, spend time with the information, feel it, sense […]

Twitter-networks were used by the citizens of the North African states to communicate and organize during the Arab Spring. The virtuality of a computer network becomes tactile and palpable here, like the virtual organization led to actual protests in the streets. The purpose of this data visualisation is to illustrate a magazine-cover and spread and was created as part of an academic graphic design programme. Sources: René Rieger, Digital Arab Spring. Gestalten Blackboard entry (2012).

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

Artist Tali Weinberg is working since 2015 on extensive series of textile data-art documenting heat waves, water color variations, average temperatures, etc. On her website you can discover the dozen different pieces from the “Climate Datascape” series, as well as other data projects. I translate climate data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration into abstracted landscapes and waterscapes, materializing the data with plant-derived fibers and dyes and […]

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 […]

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. […]

The 100 Year Climate Yarn is a large, crocheted Data-Art wall-hanging which tracks the daily maximum temperatures in Adelaide, South Australia over a 100 year period from 1920 to 2020. Textile Artist Sandra Lepore worked with Energy & Climate Specialist Heather Smith to plan the work using colours carefully selected to emphasise extreme temperatures. Sources: www.facebook.com/myclimateyarn/ www.instagram.com/myclimateyarn/ Related: Also see our entry 2013 – Temperature Scarves and Afghans […]

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. Source: Seung Lee (2019) Twitter thread. Related: Also see our entry 2013 – Temperature Scarves and Afghans.

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 […]

Soft City is a large-scale textile series that maps the urban fabric of Black neighborhoods in the Boston area. The tapestries map historic (redlined) and contemporary Black neighborhoods, including Roxbury, Dorchester, and East Cambridge. The information mapped tells the story of the past, present and future of Black residents, and the ecological resilience of the neighborhoods they live in. Hard (impervious) and soft (pervious) land uses are codified using colors with overlays of Black […]

Jordan Cunliffe is an embroidery designer and author with a focus on data and storytelling. Cunliffe is taking traditional and historic textile techniques, and pairing them with contemporary concepts. Her work includes binary encoding of her childhood diary with black and white beads, representing overlapping series of data using embroidery, representing time, sleep patterns, migration patterns, with threads and beads. Jordan Cunliffe is the author of a book called “Record, Map & […]

The Sensing Data course was held at KH-Berlin weißensee in 2024–2025. Its focus was on questioning “What happens when we can not only read information visually, but also can experience it through other senses?”. As a result of the course, 17 student projects have been realized, all being original data-physicalizations involving textile work addressing a specific research question. All 17 projects are documented on the course’s website. Source: Mark-Jan Bludau (2025) Sensing […]

Data physicalization of the Montreal Contemporary Art Museum’s Collection, by Lena Moka. Artists’ origins are represented by fluffy pom-poms whose tones range from pastel shades to occasional bursts of bright color. Each garland cascading from the large mobile represents a year of acquisition. Lena Moka is a researcher and cultural worker in art history and computer science, currently pursuing a PhD at the University of Montreal and technical director at Maison MONA. Lena Moka […]

Anne Lacambre is the atlas editor of the French publisher Autrement, and also an embroidery artist. Among many other projects around the embroidering of maps, Anne reproduced an ancient Braille map of the Mississippi entirely with white thread on a white fabric, to reproduce the white on white look of the original Braille map. Relief has been rendered with specific stitches, to represent both the shape of the river and the dots representing the cities names in Braille. This map offers a tactile […]