String art was protagonista of our Halloween workshop, a creative experience where you could draw with threads.

20 ottobre 2019 – Considering how string art is becoming very popular on Pinterest pictures, and it is taking its space in the worlds of art and crafts like no other, we have decided to dedicate our Halloween workshop to it, making a smiling pumpkin face, as shown in the pics.  We cut the wood, painted it, and hammered the nails, inviting people to fill the spaces with threads while enjoying some good food together. String art technique requires the use of string, wool, or yarn to colour a drawing bordered with hammered nails.

This visual art was first born by the mind of Mary Everest Boole, an English woman which thought to use curve stitching the help children learning the mathematic Beziér curve.  The beziér curve was made to get an accurate way to describe a curve that worked for both manufacture and design, since  French engineer Pierre Bézier used it to design automobile bodies at Renault. However, the study of these curves was first developed in 1959 by mathematician Paul de Casteljau using de Casteljau’s algorithm.  Today the Bezier curve is used in computational graphic and design related fields. The string art got popular in the 60s when a popular hobby kit distributor at the time, Open Door Enterprises, first marketed his string art kits in the late 1960s.

Today this art is evolving into computational form by the Greek Petros Vrellis, an engineer specialised in art science who put together artificial intelligence, art, and manufacture. Petros can handmade portraits with threads on a loom, “the pattern is generated from a specially designed algorithm, coded in openframeworks (http://openframeworks.cc/ ). The algorithm takes as input a digital photograph and outputs the knitting pattern. Over 2 billion calculations are needed to produce each pattern; not much of a load for today’s computers, but definitely an impossible task for the human brain. So, this is a new and unique type of knitting that could not have been implemented a few decades ago, without computers. “