Co-Creative Knitting: explorations of an improvisational practices

This proposal addresses the profile area: Art, Technology, Materiality, by focusing on discussions of the nature of the materiality of artistic practice and its implications. The proposal considers the interplay between making and thinking, encompassing both the human and the non-human, resulting in co-constructed knowledge and meaning through performative and textile practices. This performative lecture presents a collaborative work-in-progress project with the objective of exploring the dimensions of co-creative knitting practices. Drawing on artistic research, this presentation includes co-knitting performance and a theoretical discussion of the framework of the practices. Taking point of departure in the following questions the project explores collaborative artistic practices that are improvisational and experimental in nature: Which components and tools contribute to the phenomenon of co-knitting? How can partnership of playful improvisation enable novel ways to explore performative textile methods? How can documentation support ongoing exploration of methods for understanding the phenomenon and its various nuanced perspectives?

The following texts are quotations from our work journal documenting the collaborative knitting workshops during September-October 2023. The quotes illustrate our experiences of the co-creative knitting processes.

With this proposal we introduce the co-creative knitting practice as playful and improvisational entanglement of human and non-human and invite others to join, interrupt, influence and inform our research explorations.