You should check out the rest of the Licia He's work too. She's doing really cool stuff with watercolors and plotters, with a free course on it actively in the works. Unfortunately her site went down some time recently, yet archive.org has it here:
Interesting approach with the brush. I added a peristaltic pump on mine to pump paint or any fluid to a syringe tip on the XY stage [1]. Example with bleach pointillism to do stuff on fabric [2]
... there's no lock stitch underneath the fabric? if you pull on 1 thread the whole thing comes apart?
I have a Husqvarana Designer Jade 35 Embroidery sewing machine, and the embroidery arm is just that: an x-y plotter/positioner that the computer can synchronize with the timing of the needle stitch.
Yep, seems to be a drawback of the punch needle embroidery technique, though, not just this specific automation of it. From a light skimming of a couple of articles even hand-done work in this style lacks a lock stitch and relies on the friction of the fabric and tightly packed loops.
Though that could make for an interesting ephemeral art piece, particularly paired with generated/algorithmic designs—a plotter that embroiders a piece and then unwinds it once finished, repeating in a loop and accumulating wear and knots and flaws.
From the videos I've seen, it's essentially the same as the way you make rugs - those are sealed on the back with a wash of glue and something like hessian. Presumably you can do the same here to "lock it in", as it were.
(I did try punch needle once but managed to misread the instructions and threaded the needle wrong. Hilarity ensued.)
That triggered a memory: For some reason, in 1980s Sweden, it was felt that the grade 1-9 classes of textile crafting needed to "get with the times". The solution was that many schools bought these digital Husqvarna sewing machines with various embroidery programs.
https://x.com/licia_he
She uses plotters with watercolors and does other awesome experiments.