Knitwitter by Wisterlitz is a collaborative artwork that facilitates a tactile engagement with digital data through knitting and crochet. It is an invitation for anyone familiar with knitting needles or a crochet hook and yarn to encode some text in to a pattern, and then use that pattern to hide their message in a piece of knitting or crochet.
The Knitwitter app encodes your text into binary code and makes pattern suggestions, but the message you choose to encode and how you choose to interpret the pattern in your knitting or crochet is up to you.
The resulting piece of knitting or crochet can then be sent in to become part of the Control Shift Exhibition taking place in Bristol in Autumn 2020.
For all links, see our blog post.
Knitwitter was Wisterlitz’s response to an open call for Control Shift – a new arts programme that explores creative and critical approaches to technology.
The Control Shift provocation: How we can reframe and rethink our relationships with technology? What might happen if there was more space for poetic or tactile engagements with the digital? Can we reconsider our connections, responsibilities and embodied entanglements with technology?
Knitwitter features in this Pervasive Media Studio Lunchtime Talk, where Control Shift curators Becca Rose, Martha King, and Rod Dickinson discuss core ideas and share the themes that underpin Control Shift.
This blog documents the process of developing Knitwitter, which was developed during the COVID-19 lockdown of 2020.
Control Shift is funded by: Arts Council England, University of the West of England, Knowle West Media Centre and the Institute of Coding.
Wisterlitz 