blog soup
This is the eighth in a series of blog posts about the Material Programming Project . We are developing malleable knitting software for the Kniterate , a semi-industrial knitting machine. This post is mostly about running a workshop as part of Lab Day at a Local First Conference , and successfully doing some long distance knitting. The first post, on the Knitout project, is available here .…
This is the seventh in a series of blog posts about the Material Programming Project . We are developing malleable knitting software for the Kniterate , a semi-industrial knitting machine. This post is about working with colour. The first post, on the Knitout project, is available here . In the past few weeks we’ve been working a lot more with Patchwork , an extremely fun and anarchic piece of…
This is the sixth in a series of blog posts about the Material Programming Project . We are developing malleable knitting software for the Kniterate , a semi-industrial knitting machine. This post is about some really exciting experiments adapting knit software to work in an experimental collaboration tool. The first post, on the Knitout project, is available here . We had the final kniterate…
This is the fifth in a series of blog posts about the Material Programming Project . We are developing malleable knitting software for the Kniterate , a semi-industrial knitting machine. This post is a bunch of notes from the past few weeks. The first post, on the Knitout project, is available here . It’s been a few weeks since I’ve had a chance to write up notes on Material Programming, mostly…
For the material programming project workshops, we have made an adapted version of CMU’s original Knitout visualiser, that allows you to write javascript code and export directly to files that run on the Kniterate machine. The visualiser uses a Javascript library called knitout, which allows you to write code that can be translated to run on a knitting machine. knitout-js commands This table is…
This is the fourth in a series of blog posts about the Material Programming Project . We are developing malleable knitting software for the Kniterate , a semi-industrial knitting machine. The first post, on the Knitout project, is available here , a longer post about the Kniterate machine is here , and a guide to the different file formats is here . This week I learned 2-bed knitting on the…
This is the third in a series of blog posts about the Material Programming Project . We are developing malleable knitting software for the Kniterate , a semi-industrial knitting machine. The first post, on the Knitout project, is available here , and a longer post about the Kniterate machine is here . The next post includes more detail about Kcode. B, Rosie and I met this week to work on knitout…
This is the second in a series of blog posts about the Material Programming Project . We are developing malleable knitting software for the Kniterate , a semi-industrial knitting machine. This post is about the machine. The first post, on the Knitout project, is available here . The next post, which covers the Knitout and Kcode file formats in more detail, is available here. Today we had the first…
This is the first in a series of blog posts about the Material Programming Project , a collaboration between researchers at Chelsea College of Arts and the Creative Computing Institute. We are developing malleable knitting software for the Kniterate , a semi-industrial knitting machine. The next post, which talks about the Kniterate machine in more detail, is available here. I’ve been working on a…
This is a write-up of a small tool that scrapes a graph of related dishes, according to the see also section of Wikipedia. I made it a couple of years ago for a project with the Knowledge Futures Group, along with Favour Kelvin , who was doing an internship with us at the time. I’ve revisited it a couple of times since, including re-doing the seeding stage and improving the filtering. The code for…
This is a writeup of research into using satellite imagery to track mining operations, funded as part of Bellingcat’s 2024 Technical Writing Fellowship , and is a more in-depth version of a short guide published on their online platform. The accompanying Multispectral Satellite Imagery Explorer tool is available here . This guide is intended as an overview of my research, and a starting point for…
This year, I’ve been involved in making two different synthesisers. The first of these has been a collaboration with the electronic musician John Richards, aka the Dirty Electronics Ensemble with artwork by Colin Therlemont ( Tellamont ). The project is called More Roar , and the synth is a digital frequency modulation synthesiser built using a STM32 microcontroller. the More Roar synth in its…
The Agrarianism and Revolution Reading Group met weekly for the duration of the Delfina Foundation’s 2022 Politics of Food Programme . Organised by myself and fellow resident Åsa Sonjasdotter , the impetus for the group came from a shared interest in discussing radical movements, ideas and materials concerning land and food. ARRG (as it is affectionately known) met 10 times over the course of the…
Last April, Gary and I gave a talk titled “Soft Bread, Hard Times” as part of Akademie Schloss Solitude’s festival Fragile Solidarity, Fragile Connections . The talk (+ accompanying workshop) explored the history and theory of modifying food texture, processes that exist simultaneously on the highly industrial and the intimiate/bodily level. The original slides from the talk are here ; this post…
first time using the machine to produce a swatch --> Since I started working at the Creative Computing Institute in January of this year, I’ve been on-and-off teaching myself how to use the Silver Reed SK840 digital knitting machine that we have there.It can be used either as a purely manual machine, or partially computer-controlled, using a box called a ‘Silverlink’ that mimics the behaviour of a…
A few weeks ago I got invited to give a talk as part of a panel on “The Interfaces of AI Art Practices”, one I was initially somewhat surprised to be asked to give, identifying neither as an artist, nor someone that works primarily with “AI” in the sense that that term is often used, nor even someone who really thinks about interfaces very much in direct contrast to the other two panellists,…
Last week we ( Foreign Objects ) presented the project An Introduction To The Bell System taken from the title of an internal employee handbook that we came across in the Bell Labs archives as part of a talk hosted by Rhizome and the New Museum. The piece consists of a series of 5 embroidered jumpsuits, each themed around a particular strand of Bell Labs’ Computing Sciences Research Center…
The First 10,000 Years is a collaboration with Gary , part of his larger body of work on the catastrophe insurance industry. The whole project is called FUD , named for both the bitcoin-speculator acronym ‘Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt’, and for its sonic qualities. The First 10,000 years simulates a market-simulation – a 10,000 year model – that serves as the backbone of a speculative trading…
A few weeks ago, Foreign Objects released Bot or Not , a project that we’d worked on for the 2019-20 Mozilla Creative Media Awards . You play a game of ‘truth’ against a random opponent: at the end, you have to guess whether or not they’re human, and they make the same guess about you. The idea started as something of a joke: the theme of this years’ awards was ‘examining AI’s effect on media and…
This is a long-overdue writeup of a project that Gary and I worked on last summer, as part of a Schloss Solitude Web Residency Rigged Systems , curated by Jonas Lund. Parts of this are adapted from answers to questions that different people have asked about the project thanks, Callil , and to Denise Sumi for interviewing us . If you’d like to read some other writing about this piece, it was…