Photographic Knitting Club

︎2020
No.01 08.02
No.02 08.22
No.03 08.23
No.04 08.24
No.05 09.25
No.06 10.22
No.07 11.19
No.08 11.21
No.09 12.01

︎2021
No.10 04.05
No.11 05.05
No.12 07.11
No.13 08.03

︎Exhibition 09 2021
︎Exhibition 01 2021           

Conversation with Curator 

 ︎ Tutorial 


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.



Meeting No. 001 

Conducted virtually.

Joined by artists from NY and SF where social distancing is enforced.

The artists included Francesca Rodriguez Sawaya, Renata Gaui (both Tangible Code instructors), Pamela Liou (an open source loom creator), Rena Anakwe (an artist who works with sound, visuals, and scent), and Windy Chien (an artist who works with knots).
Image Capture

During the workshop, we played with different ways of looking at our familiar spaces and used our cameras to pay close attention to these findings. These hundreds of photographs were stitched and reconstructed into three-dimensional digital scans.

Photo Knitting

After comparing similar points in photographs, the photogrammetry software is also able to calculate the original capture position, angles, and sequence of shots in space.
Data Portrait I

The black box in this diagram is the location of the laptop, the triangle indicates the first photograph taken, and the outer rectangle is the shape of this room.

These experiments use digitizing technologies as a way to generate data portraits, and offer the possibility to surface local knowledge that forms the background of our inner experience.
Data Portrait II

The places where people decide to take the most photographs are also the places with the most detail in the final scan, creating a visual emphasis that corresponds to each artist’s unique set of concerns and emotions at that time. Each artist’s unique set of concerns, physical constraints, time of day, and habits produces images of wildly varying focus and emotional valence.

For example, Pamela Liou observed that she “spen(t) a lot of time over here at this nightmare corner where things tend to accumulate for weeks... I have these, like, psychological vacuum spaces, and I just psychologically block them off."
Layered Portraits

Individual portraits connected using screens as an anchor.