Knitronica pics

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Yesterday myself, Marie Young and Iris Cooper took over the Big Hands music venue as part of the Whitworth Gallery Pubcrawl. We had a Brother Kh950i electronic and a KH836 punchcard machine, along with a bunch of other tools including a tenori-on sequencer, video camera, original knitting videos, metasynth 5.1, wireless mic, a garter carriage and lots of cables.

The aim of the afternoon was to present a number of experiments linking sound to knitting. Marie’s sampling of the Tenori-on interface worked really well, producing some amazing 16 stitch wide progressive patterns. We also had a number of punchcards for people to both knit a pattern repeat and programme the device with their own design.

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I attempted some ambient amplification and distortion of the sounds of the knitting activities, mic-ing up the machines and running the sound through a series of fx modules in Isadora. I missed a trick by not recording and then knitting these sounds but it was one of a few ideas that came out of the day itself. I did some sequencing of my own, asking people to design 64×64 stitch designs which were then scanned and imported into Metasynth in order to produce interesting sonic samples which were then knitted on the KH950i.

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We also had some live music with Nicholas James of Castlefield Gallery’s New Art Spaces joining us on guitar to interpret a score derived from Clint  Cahill’s punchcard whilst Clint himself knitted the piece. Iris knitted a waveform generated from Joy Division’s Love Will Tear Us Apart, before Mary Stark knitted a spectrograph of a tune by Teebs to finish off the afternoon.Cheers to Big Hands for hosting and to Ed Watts of Whitworth for organising.