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The piece that I’m premiering in the Craft Futures exhibition this summer is called “Knit
for Defense.” It’s an animation that explores the cinema of combat in relation to the cultural
tradition of wartime knitting, and so you’ll see things like soldiers from World War II
jumping from planes, or aerial footage taken from drones. It’s obscured, in a sense,
through these knitted stitches, these moving images of knitted stitches. It was created
with a custom software called Knitiscope, which is based on machine knitted swatches
that I created. The piece was kind of inspired by two things: one, a pro-peace, wartime knitting
project I did during the last senate campaign called “Stitch for Senate,” and also the
fact that I teach at U-Mass Boston and I have had in the last several years students who
have served in the last decade. And so I’m interested in tying the past to the present,
but also kind of asking this question of what is the citizen’s role or lack of role in
pushing things like war forward.