KATE HARTMAN

My recently released StitchLits LED Sewing Kit was featured yesterday on Instructables! This instruction set tells you everything you need to know about how to sew tiny LEDs into your clothes. You can gather the necessary materials from sources like Digikey, Sparkfun, and your local sewing store, but if you’d like to get everything you need in a nicely assembled kit, my StitchLits Kit is available on Etsy. It even comes in a cute little tin!

Thinking Physically Guest Stars each come bearing a unique perspective on the topics we’ll be covering in class. Their visits will range from short talks to demonstrations to in-class workshops.

From out in the world, we’ll be joined by Anne Gridley from the Nature Theater of Oklahoma, Jamie O’Shea of the Office for the Development of Substitute Materials, James Bigbee Garver of the Tiny Dance Film Series, and wearables artist and fashion designer Di Mainstone.

Closer to home, we’ll also be hearing from a handful of ITP alums and current faculty. Robert Faludi will shed some light on affordances. John Schimmel will talk about designing for bodies with different capabilities. Fiona Carswell will lead us in a discussion concerning body, memory, and evidence. And finally, Andrew Schneider will talk about bringing body-based devices into the performative realm.

Updates on the Guest Star schedule can be found here. Looks like it’s going to be an interesting semester!

At the moment, I’m holed away in the Canadian Rockies, at the Banff New Media Institute. I’m here as part of the faculty for Almost Perfect, a residency for artists who are creating works that utilize locative media. Here’s the blurb:

The Almost Perfect ‘Call and Response’ residency at the Banff New Media Institute is an annual, concentrated four-week experimental prototyping lab that explores the creation and context of location. Practitioners from all walks of locative and mobile media practice are encouraged to apply to the programme. We are particularly interested in practice that extends beyond the device out into the environment, be it landscape or datascape.

The massive scale of Banff National Parks Rocky Mountains and the expanse of the Great Plains to the east provide a unique opportunity to un-tether yourself from the usual coordinates of place. Geographies of time, scale and great disruption lay exposed, lending themselves to the call and response of technology and nature. This residency allows for the time and space to consider how modern pervasive technologies allow us to disconnect from our desktop cells and interact with the world in a whole new way.

Today I had the pleasure of doing studio visits (alongside my fellow Peer Advisors Kay Burns and Sophia New) with the 11 fabulous artists who are participating in the residency:

More info to follow on both their work and mine. In the meantime, check out the view I woke up to this past Sunday!

That’s right, folks - you can now have a Lilypad Xbee of your very own! They went live on Sparkfun today. Check it out:

You can order them here. Documentation and tutorials are coming soon. And if you’d like a personal introduction, check out the Wireless Wearables class that Rob Faludi and I are teaching at NYCResistor next month!

Yesterday I had the pleasure of visiting the Computer Science department at the Kingston campus of the University of Rhode Island.

I gave a talk (titled “Considering the Body“) which gave an overview of physical and wearable computing as well as look at how we approach both of these areas of study at ITP. The campus is beautiful (I envy their abundance of fall foliage!) and it was a pleasure to meet everyone there. Thanks to Lutz Hamel for inviting me!

I’m teaching a new workshop at LEMUR next month. Here’s the details:

Fuzzy Logic: Intro to Soft Circuits

Have you ever snuggled with a circuit? This workshop will provide an introduction to materials and construction techniques for creating soft and flexible circuits. Topics will include conductive fabric and thread, soft switches, iron-on circuits, sewing notions as electrical connectors, sewable LEDs, and the Arduino Lilypad. In addition, introductory electronics and sewing techniques will be reviewed. With basic soft circuit techniques in hand, students will have the opportunity to design and implement a final soft circuit on a garment of their choice.

Dates: Saturday/Sunday 11/1, 11/2, 12:00-4:30 pm
Cost: $350 including Lilypad, electronics and soft stuff
Info on this & other classes can be found here.

Thanks to everyone who came out for the show! Here’s hoping there will be another one next year…

[see the rest of the photos here]

Please join us for a tasty feast of succulent experiments, delicious research, and exquisite projects served by the 2007-2008 ITP Resident Researchers, including works by:

Gabriel Barcia-Colombo
Jenny Chowdhury
Rob Faludi
Kate Hartman
Jeffrey LeBlanc
John Schimmel
Demetrie Tyler

ITP | Tisch | NYU:
721 Broadway, 4th Floor

I had the pleasure of joining the ITP student-run 5-in-5 for as a guest for a day. Day 3’s fun and innovative projects included an adult Lite Brite, a dynamic map of the everchanging ITP floorplan, and a fabulous Processing-based rendition of the Brady bunch intro that included a blonde wig made of gaffer’s tape.

For my project for the day, I created the beginnings of a Soft Circuit Sampler - a conductive textiles version of the traditional needlework sampler. According to Wikipedia:

“The oldest surviving samplers were constructed in the 15th and 16th centuries. As there were no pre-printed patterns available for needleworkers, a stitched model was needed. Whenever a needlewoman saw a new and interesting example of a stitching pattern, she would quickly sew a small sample of it onto a piece of cloth - her ’sampler’. The patterns were sewn randomly onto the fabric as a reference for future use, and the woman would collect extra stitches and patterns throughout her lifetime.

16th Century English samplers were stitched on a narrow band of fabric 6-9in (15-23cm) wide. As fabric was very expensive, these samplers were totally covered with stitches. These were known as band samplers and valued highly, often being mentioned in wills and passed down through the generations.”

I decided to do an interpretation of the band sampler and have the base cloth for my sampler be a long, narrow form:

Since the idea with the sampler is to collect techniques as you learn them, this is just the beginning of a work in progress. The first example on it compares various soft conductors: ironed-on conductive fabric, as well as machine-sewn and hand-sewn conductive thread.

Soon to be added are different insulation techniques, crimp beads with surface mounts components, as well as various connectors and switches. More pictures to follow!