Newsknitter: Knitted Visualization

Image of knitted news
Newsknitter is a project that gathers news from RSS feeds and then generates a visualization that can then be knitted into a sweater. Check out the images of sweaters knitted. This project has been exhibited at Ars Electronica and is the work of two PhD candidates at Kunstuniversität Linz. At first the idea of machine knitted sweaters of text visualization sounds like a conceptual art work with no future, but as I think about it, the idea of just-in-time information being visualized and used to generate stable material objects like a sweater sounds timely. All sorts of objects could have their designs generated on the spot and on demand from information off the net. Why should data be only visualized and not materialized?