During my stay at the Digital Poetics and Politics institute at Queen’s University, I learned all about the radical potential of knitting from Kirsty, one of my co-participants. An unlikely combination, perhaps, until you actually start to think about it more deeply.
Knitting is, in itself, a remarkably rich metaphor when considering issues of gender and power; hitch this up to a discussion of computer viruses and things really start to blossom. Kirsty, for example, took the binary code from an existing virus called Code Red and converted it into a piece of knitting (in red wool, of course). Rather than rendering the virus harmless, this act was actually a form of re-encoding; one could imagine it being carried invisibly (ie worn as a garment) until the wearer decided to decode it.
There’s also a certain kind of circularity at play: the earliest programmable computers were based on the Jacquard Loom’s innovative use of punchcards. The Loom itself marks a key moment in the industrialization of craft skills (cf knitting).
Finally, at the institute, we began to imagine a moment in the future when radical knitting is itself gradually co-opted, or ‘mainstreamed’.
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