Introducing Knitwitter

How we can reframe and rethink our relationships with technology? What might happen if there was more space for poetic or tactile engagements with the digital? Can we reconsider our connections, responsibilities and embodied entanglements with technology?

Control Shift call for artists, Feb/March 2020, funded by Arts Council England, University of the West of England, Knowle West Media Centre and the Institute of Coding.


Knitwitter by Wisterlitz is a collaborative artwork that facilitates a tactile engagement with digital data through knitting and crochet.

Knitwitter is an invitation for anyone familiar with knitting needles or a crochet hook and yarn to encode some text in to a pattern, and then use that pattern to hide their message in a piece of knitting or crochet.

The Knitwitter app encodes your text into binary code and makes pattern suggestions, but the message you choose to encode and how you choose to interpret the pattern in your knitting or crochet is up to you.

We will curate pictures of the knitted messages into a collaborative artwork next year, so get knitting, get crocheting and get snapping. Tag pictures of your Knitwtter knitting or crochet on social media with #knitwitter to be part of ourknitted database of yarn.

We will not decode the messages or store the text. That data will remain encoded in the knitting.