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Kendall Ross Gets Personal with Her Colorful Sweaters Embedded with Stories

22 Nov, 2023

This post was originally published on Colossal

“I would never wear this in public” (2022), hand-knit with wool the artist hand-dyed for Factory Obscura in Oklahoma City. All images © Kendall Ross, shared with permission

Creating pieces that are part artwork and part fashion, Oklahoma City-based artist Kendall Ross of I’d Knit That imbues her knitwear with plenty of personality. “My I’d Knit That project got started because I thought the name was funny, and I was convinced I needed to claim the Instagram handle before someone else did back in 2019,” she tells Colossal. “Originally, it was a very casual way for me to share photos of what I was making and to organize knitting meet-ups with my friends from college. Still, I started taking it very seriously, and it ended up being a very important way for me to share my art and connect with other artists.”

Ross emphasizes bright hues in her pieces, using stitching methods like intarsia or Fair Isle colorwork—also known as stranded colorwork—to illustrate playful graphics and incorporate original texts. In a statement on her site, she writes that she is “drawn to telling unapologetically intimate, complicated stories of feminine, overlooked moments…putting private emotions on display for people to wear on their chest in their public lives.”

All of Ross’ vests and cardigans are hand-knit from either acrylic or wool yarn, the latter of which the artist hand-dyes herself whenever she is able. “I have done a lot of hand-dyeing in the past, and I really love the process of it,” she says, sharing that space is limited in her home studio, so she isn’t able to add color to all of her materials. This winter, she’s looking forward to a residency at Penland School of Craft in January, where she’ll focus on the hand-dyeing process.

Ross is currently working toward shows in 2024 in Oklahoma City, Tulsa, and the Pacific Northwest, and she also teaches at the Oklahoma Contemporary Arts Center, where this winter, she is offering a class on how to knit sweaters for dogs. “I think they only agreed to let me do it because I talk about my basset hound Frankie so much, but I’m very excited about it!”

Find more in the artist’s shop, and follow updates on Instagram. (via Kottke)

 

“Girl Talk” (2021), hand-knit acrylic

Left: “Stress Knit” (2022), hand-knit wool. Right: “Bad Driver” (2022), hand-knit with wool the artist hand-dyed

“Product Placement” (2023), hand-knit wool

“Fake Vest” (2023), hand-knit wool

Left: “Storyteller 2” (2023), hand-knit with wool for La Colombe Coffee. Right: “Company” (2022), hand-knit with wool the artist hand-dyed

“Everyone will forget about this” (2023), hand-knit with wool the artist hand-dyed

“Boring” (2023), hand-knit wool

Do stories and artists like this matter to you? Become a Colossal Member today and support independent arts publishing for as little as $5 per month. The article Kendall Ross Gets Personal with Her Colorful Sweaters Embedded with Stories appeared first on Colossal.

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Turning down the heat: how innovative cooling techniques are tackling the rising costs of AI's energy demands

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As enterprises accelerate their AI investments, the energy demand of AI’s power-hungry systems is worrying both the organisations footing the power bills as well as those tasked with supplying reliable electricity. From large language models to digital twins crunching massive datasets to run accurate simulations on complex city systems, AI workloads require a tremendous amount of processing power.

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DLC technology pumps liquid coolants through tubes in direct contact with the processors to dissipate heat and has been proven to keep high-powered AI systems running safely. Switching to DLC has had measurable and transformative impact across multiple environments, showing reductions in cooling power consumption by nearly 90% compared to air cooling in supercomputing systems2.

Thankfully, the benefits of DLC are now also extending beyond supercomputers to reach a broader range of higher-performance servers that support both supercomputing and AI workloads. Shifting DLC from a niche offering to a more mainstream option available across more compute systems is enabling more organisations to tap into the efficiency gains made possible by DLC, which in some cases has been shown to deliver up to 65% in annual power savings3. Combining this kind of cooling innovation with new and improved power-use monitoring tools, able report highly accurate and timely insights, is becoming critical for IT teams wanting to optimise their energy use. All this is a welcome evolution for organisations grappling with rising energy costs and that are carefully considering total cost of ownership (TCO) of their IT systems, and is an area of innovation to watch in the coming years.

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Furthermore, industry leaders are shifting how they handle the heat generated by these large computing systems in order to drive further efficiency in AI. Successfully using heat from data centres for other uses will be a vital component to mitigating both overall energy security risks and the efficiency challenges that AI introduces. Data centres are being redesigned to capture by-product heat and use it as a valuable resource, rather than dispose of it as waste heat. Several industries are already benefiting from capturing data centre heat, such as in agriculture for greenhouses, or heating buildings in healthcare and residential facilities. This has been successfully implemented in the UK with the Isambard-AI supercomputer and in Finland with the LUMI supercomputer — setting the bar for AI sustainability best practice globally.

The message is clear: as AI becomes a bigger part of digital transformation projects, so too must the consideration for resource-efficient solutions grow. AI sustainability considerations must be factored into each stage of the AI life cycle, with solutions like DLC playing a part in in a multifaceted IT sustainability blueprint.

By working together with governments to set effective and actionable environmental frameworks and benchmarks, we can encourage the growth and evolution of the AI industry, spurring dynamic innovation in solutions and data centre design for the benefit of all.

1. AI is set to drive surging electricity demand from data centres while offering the potential to transform how the energy sector works – News – IEA
2. https://www.hpe.com/us/en/newsroom/blog-post/2024/08/liquid-cooling-a-cool-approach-for-ai.html
3. HPE introduces next-generation ProLiant servers engineered for advanced security, AI automation and greater performance
4. https://www.aph.gov.au/Parliamentary_Business/Committees/Senate/Adopting_Artificial_Intelligence_AI

Image credit: iStock.com/Dragon Claws

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