cyber/fiber
cyber/fiber (2021-) is an ongoing project exploring the links between computation and knitting. The work involves a modded KH-930e knitting machine connected to a computer running open source software from All Yarns Are Beautiful (AYAB). I use both design software and code to create the designs.
For my first experiment, I translated words into binary code that was punched manually into a punch card and then printed on a knitting machine. In another experiment, I knitted artifacts/images from 1970s computing history.
I treat knitting as a slower form of computation. Both knitting and coding are fundamentally procedural: The process of generating a knitting pattern from a swatch has resonances with writing lines of code. Picking up a dropped stitch on the machine reminds me of debugging code. Writing a for loop that cycles through an array of elements is like repeatedly running the knitting carriage over a bed of needles.
Illustration published in Donna Haraway’s 1985 “A Cyborg Manifesto”
Typography from the 1984 film It’s a Miracle
A swatch knit with the binary code.
A page from the newsletter published by Computer People for Peace, an activist group of technologists in the 1970s.
A ferromagnetic core memory plate bought off the internet. Hand woven in 1970s USSR, it functioned as computer memory in the Saratov-2.
