“Photographic Knitting Club” is a series of participatory workshops that introduce participants to the photographic practice of photogrammetry. Developed as a scientific method for obtaining measurements from a series of images to remotely survey land in the nineteenth century, photogrammetry today has many applications, from 3D animation to forensics and state-sponsored surveillance. Photographic Knitting Club reflects on these applications of digital tools, while centering our attention on the domestic space, a site increasingly exposed to corporate surveillance and data extraction.

In the workshops, participants engaged in practices that reframe these imaging and quantification tools as digital crafts and connect data visualization with embodied experience. I led a series of exercises that explore the mechanics of photogrammetry, the material practices of photographic production, and the tactility associated with inhabiting our most familiar spaces. After processing and anonymizing the visual information shared by the participants, I perform handicraft on this data as a way of experimenting with new modes of seeing within 3D software. Inverting the association between photogrammetry and instrumentalist extraction of data, the artifacts fabricated for this piece instead allow us to reimagine and make strange the spaces we inhabit and the intimate objects with which we share them.