The ‘data beanie’ is knitted from possum fur and designed to keep your head warm in the frosty mid winter mornings in Canberra. This beanie is computer knitted from punch-cards that encode data logged from seals diving under the antarctic. Nigel Helyer sonified this dataset with music boxes in his concert piece Biologging Retrofit. I transferred Nigel’s musical punchcards into a pattern for the beanie, and worked with Angelina Russo to produce a series of prototypes for a computer knitted beanie for the ICAD 2016 conference. Attendees to the conference were able to choose between 3 different colour schemes, and to hear their beanie pattern on Nigel’s music boxes at the ICAD concert.
We developed the idea further into a “data scarf” and Angelina led a workshop at the conference, where 10 women designed scarves based on their own datasets, which included daily temperatures in Canberra, a calendar of family birthdays, a Ph.D. thesis on the effect of music on typing speed, and the budget of an arts studio.
Ian Warden devoted his entire Gang-gang column in the Canberra Times to the data-beanie :).
Filed under: conference, research, workshop
