Knitting and Crochet as Experiment: Exploring Social and Material Practices of Computation and Craft

Hand crafted textile production has a close but often tense relationship with technology and mechanisation. Needles, hooks, and frames have been used to extend techniques that had developed from knotting and hand weaving. Industrialised textile production transformed hand crafted processes and techniques by formalising repeatable actions as logical expressions thus enabling them to be performed by machines. These algorithmic and iterative processes were central to the development of the mechanised punch-­card operations of the weaving looms of Jacques de Vaucanson, and their subsequent refinement by Joseph-­Marie Jacquard (Williams1991). Charles Babbage and Herman Hollerith went on to adapt such approaches in the creation of computing machines, developments which shaped the social and material practices of both hand crafted textiles and computational technologies