Craft Hackers

I got excited this morning when I revisited the Rhizome site to see a featured event called Craft Hackers.

Craft Hackers is a panel discussion among artists who use crafting
techniques to explore high tech culture and the relationship between
needlework and computer programming.

Alas, it seems that the contributors to the panel are more interested in illustrating themes of computing and networks using traditional practises rather than considering any crosses between the two.

This is a bit of a theme with lots of the work I have looked at: artist/maker is inspired by aspects of the computer, that they then use to turn back to their easel/loom/workbench and create pieces that explore them conceptually. Which is fair enough, but I'm interested to see what would happen if they tried to expand their practise onto actually using the computer as a medium, rather than an inspiration.

The one speakers work that caught my eye was Cat Mazzo's KnitPro, which turns digital images into knitting patterns. Although it doesn't engage with the computer a great deal, it still asks questions about where the creativity occurs in the project, effectively truncating the conception and planning stages of creation.

Another intreresting aside is this, Embloggery, where each post is a handmade cross stitch. Yet the posts are composed of the same nonsense that most blogs are. Hmm...