About KNiiTTiiNG

KNiiTTiiNG uses the Nintendo Wii to knit.  KNiiTTiiNG was created by an artist and an engineer turned behavioral scientist. 

Artist Rachel Beth Egenhoefer works with overlaps between technology and textiles. Scientist Kyle E. Jennings is interested in repurposing technology for creative human machine interactions.

contact us here: iinfo@kniittiing.com

Egenhoefer explains more about how the project came about: 

"I had been interested in the idea of virtual knitting and I was thinking about both the idea of representing code and also the motion of knitting and the motion of computing.  I became interested in tracking the way your hands move and the intricate details of maneuvering a stitch.  Around the same time the Nintendo Wii was gaining popularity and I picked up an interest in the new gaming consol that uses accelerometers and motion tracking.  At first I was looking to the Wii as something to hack and interface with traditional knitting needles.  But when I started to play the Wii and watch other people play, I thought about my past work and ideas of game play being algorithmic, interactive, and humorous, and then it only seemed to make sense that I didn’t hack open a Wii, but rather re-program the Wii so I could knit with it. 

After discovering some of the features inside the Wiimotes Kyle became excited about trying to write code to interface with the motes.  At first it was just his programming way of thinking that sparked his interest in solving the challenge.  But as we started to work together, me breaking down every microscopic movement of knitting and him explaining the trigonometry behind the accelerometers, we realized we each brought our own interests to this project and the collaboration was born. 

The more we started to work together and play silly Wii games, the more the ideas started to come.  We thought about the craze of Dance Dance Revolution and Guitar Hero and then thought we’d make our own type of “Knitting Hero”.  Users follow the knits and purls as they move up the screen challenging the player to knit in rhythm with the game, and without dropping a stitch! In Dance Dance Revolution the player produces a dance (or something like a dance), and in Guitar Hero the player creates an actual song.  In KNiiTTiiNG however, you can only knit a virtual cloth object which comes back to my ideas about tactility and code, while also bringing in elements of pop culture and scatological video games."

--June 2008