Cross Stitch
Meditation
Rick Banghart merges
art and technology
By Lily O’Brien
Y
ou’ll find Rick Banghart most
mornings around 5:30am
sitting at Peet’s at the
Hamilton Marketplace in Novato,
sipping coffee and in stitches—
counted cross stitches, that is. He
spends around two hours there
every day, working tenaciously
on a single piece of cloth. But
these are no ordinary cross stitch
pieces. Banghart, who has a Ph.D.
in Educational Technology, has
invented a computer program that
enables him to capture the subtle
colors and shading found in
photographs and transform them
into stitched pieces that are so
realistic, people think they are
computer generated.
Banghart was born and raised in
Lansing, Michigan, and discovered
at an early age that he loved
capturing things with technology.
His grandfather taught him about
photography, and the first thing he
bought with money saved from his
paper route, was a tape recorder.
“Recording of both sound and
images has always fascinated me,”
says Banghart. He also developed a
love for the theater, and worked as
an actor, singer and dancer, as well
as doing sound and lighting design.
While attending Michigan
State University, where he got
an undergraduate degree in
elementary education (and where
he also got his doctorate), Banghart
volunteered at the school’s FM radio
station as a sound engineer, and
This family portrait, which took Rick Banghart many months to complete,
was commissioned by a friend.
found it to be something he really
enjoyed.
Around 1976, Banghart got a job
as a sound engineer at a local TV
station where he stayed for the next
20 years, and had the opportunity
to work with incredible artists
like Yo-Yo Ma, Emanuel Ax and
Joshua Bell. “My real love is as a
liaison between technology and
the creative sorts of people,” says
Banghart.
During that time, computers were
just coming in, so he bought one,
and taught himself programming.
“I got the computers, I got the
manuals and I figured out what
these things do,” says Banghart.
He began writing software for the
TV station, as well as for freelance
clients.
One day in 1981, his son came home
from the Vermontville Maple Syrup
Festival (in Vermontville, Michigan),
with a picture of himself that had
been generated on a computer,
revealing all the pixels. A light
went off in Banghart’s brain. “I took
a close look at it and I knew that by
flipping a switch [on the computer],
these dots that create the image
could be turned into characters,”
says Banghart.” A closer look at the
printout revealed that only eight
shades had been used to create
the image. So he chose eight sepia
tone embroidery floss colors, and
using the computer printout as a
pattern—he began stitching.
Banghart says it is a mystery to him
as to why he suddenly decided to
start doing cross stitching, which
he had never done before. But he
recalled that he had seen old looms
at the Henry Ford Museum as a
child, and had liked them so much,
he built one. “I love the technology
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