project: TK 730
Earlier this year, Leonie Urff, Ricardo O'Nascimento, Anja Hertenberger and I were invited to collaborate on a project for the V2_ Summer Sessions Residencies. We're all members of the V2_ E-Textile Workspace and all have worked with electronics embedded in textiles, so we wanted to do something along these lines. None of us could've predicted the knitting typewriter that emerged out of our brainstorming sessions!
In short, it's a typewriter that re-interprets text into knitting. You type a word, and the TK 730 alphabetises the letters (and ignores duplicates) and then knits a row of 26 stitches, one representing each letter of the alphabet, with the letters from your word knitted in black. To read more about the project, visit the official TK 730 page on the V2_ website. And while you're there, be sure to check out the amazing people and projects we were lucky to share our Summer Sessions with!
update: TEI 2012
We're going to TEI 2012! TEI is a fantastic conference showcasing tangible interfaces for human computer interaction. It spans art, technology, design, philosophy and more. The TK 730 is one of around 50 project selected from a large number of entries - we are so excited to be able to participate!
Below is the demo video we made as part of our application.
presentation: Test_Lab @ V2_
The TK 730 is alive! We've reached the end of six weeks of hard work and are presenting the TK 730 at the Test_Lab at V2_ in Rotterdam. The whole evening was live streamed and can be replayed on the Summer Sessions 2011 page.
TK 730 - knitted samples in background
TK 730 - back
video: test run
Here's a video of the knitting mechanism before we made a bunch of improvements with help from Jiskar from Snijlab. It works much better now, but this gives a good impression of how all four motors work together. It knits in two colours, and you can see it missing a few stitches, but most of them are knitted perfectly!