Over the last months, I have been working and prototyping a piece of software that would take text as an input and have an embroidery pattern as its output. The main motivation came from a combination of a long lived desire to activate the machines we have at the lab (3D printer related post soon) and, in this case, joking around about what occulting actually means when put in practice and how would one approach it computationally.
The answer this tool relies on is encoding, a favourite informartion science topic of mine that IMO embodies much of the magic of computing with its origins and its fundamentals. The goal of the tool is simple, take text in any form and present different for the user to alter the resulting embroidery so that the embroidery fits the text from a subjective rather than technical perspective.
One workshop was held last semester where an earlier version of the tool was presented. During the workshop, it was emphasised that the tool itself is less about finding a way to make an encodable and decodable version of the text in embroidery geometry (even though this was an initial idea), but rather the resulting embroidery should somewhat evoke the feeling the person had related to the text they brought. Some brought poems, others wrote a description of their day, others preferred not to say. Ideally, the person would look at the embroidered pattern and remember the feeling that day, or the feeling of what they had written rather than exactly word by word what the text was.
The approach is purposefuly lossy, and is a mixture of it being technically a lossy encoding and steganography. As my work hours are limited (6-7 hours per week), finishing it has been a challenge, but a more polished beta version can be accessed via the solar server at https://occulting.kuti.diy. Pending finding out how to use Codeberg as the lab, the code will also be made open source.
Work will continue so expect the page to change from time to time! The task of making shapes actually embroideable is where most of the time is spent. For now, simple designs have yielded some ok results but then we broke all our embroidery needles… so some photos will also soon be uploaded!