Knitendo

Vintage pattern editing with video games

In the late 1980’s an amazing idea from Howard Phillips who worked for Nintendo made a peripheral prototype for the NES: a knitting machine! Connected to the NES, you would be able to knit and edit a jacquard pattern from your software. The prototype was shown at the 1987 Winter Consumer Electronics Show but didn’t get much attention. And sadly, this was never manufactured to get to consumers homes.

I Am A Teacher: Super Mario Sweater (アイアムアティーチャー スーパーマリオのセーター )

In Japan, another pattern editing software appeared in 1986 for the Famicom Disc System. And it was apparently a big success. This was probably made to attract women in buying video games and would learn you how to knit a sweater or cardigan. Adjusting pattern and size, you would then send to the company your design and get your jumper manufactured for 24$.

System: Famicom Disk System
Developer: Royal Industries Co. Ltd.
Publisher: Nintendo
Release dates:
August 27, 1986 (Japan)

Here are some screen shots of the software:

 

Pattern programming with the Commodore 64

Lucy using  her Commodore 64 in 1988 for interactive calculation of knitting parameters.

 

Commodore 64 graphic book step by step programming:

here are a more pictures

 

Multithreaded Banjo Dinosaur Knitting Adventure 2D Extreme!

A nice art project where you knit out directly your winner panels from the video game using a hacked knitting machine with a key emulator and arduino.

Travis Goodspeed, Arjan Scherpenisse, and Fabienne Serriere

Nintendo embroidery from Per Fhager.

Nuts & Milk, 2013
89X102cm, chain stitch, cotton
(Crafted Worlds 2) source

 

 

Cellular automata knitting

 

The Conway”s Game of Life  or cellular automata is a good example. It consists of a collection of cells which, based on a few mathematical rules, can live, die or multiply.  The pattern evolves in very surprising ways and can become very complex based on very simple rules.  “It also opened up a whole new field of mathematical research, the field of cellular automata… Because of Life’s analogies with the rise, fall and alterations of a society of living organisms”.

http://www.bitstorm.org/gameoflife/

And here a nice open source programme if you want to play: http://golly.sourceforge.net/

The wonderful world of cellular automata can be explored where 2D patterns are generated with simple rules.

You can find a few generators on the web, here is my favourite one:

http://sjsu.rudyrucker.com/nksapplets.htm

Here are a few examples i made using it:

I used processing to generate the patterns below which is very practical if you want to knit it. If you open processing you will have cellular automata in your examples and you can then change the size in the code and save it into a .png file.

                                                                    

                

Results of cellular automata Knitting