Artist CAT MAZZA talks with Beth Rosenberg, PART II of II

BR: Ok. Tell us about the knitPro application.
MAZZA: knitPro translates a digital image—jpg, a gif or a png—into a knit, crochet, needlepoint, or cross stitch pattern. What it does is it takes a high res image and then it lowers the resolution and maps a graph over it, which becomes a pattern that a fiber hobbyist can read, one stitch is one pixel. What’s happening now is the microRevolt site gets hits because of knitPro. You can just go and upload a picture of your dog and then make it into a cross stitch project, frame it and put it up in your kitchen. knitPro is really bringing people to the Nike project and the other projects of microRevolt.
BR: How are people hearing about knitPro?
MAZZA: It’s been blogged a little bit, and it’s been posted on different craft forums, and I think that the fact that it’s free has made it spread much more than it would otherwise.
BR: People may be using it not necessarily for logo knitting, but for just a picture of their dog.
MAZZA: Exactly. knitPro gets five to one of the hits.
BR: The most hits from what? The most hits from anything else on your site?
MAZZA: Yes.
BR: Right now microRevolt consists of the Nike project, knitPro, and then the video. Tell me about the video.
MAZZA: The video is a moving image application, like a moving image version of knitPro. Instead of taking a digital still file, it’ll take a digital video file, lower the resolution, put a stitch over it, so it looks like this animated stitch video. It’s still in development, but the prototype is working. I want to work with other people and develop animated narratives about labor.
BR: When you give workshops, can you talk a little bit about the educational practice of it all? Giving the workshops, the demonstrations, your knitting machine, all of that.
MAZZA: Well, the knitting machine is a hobbyist machine. The one that I have is this yellowing machine from the eighties. It’s about the size of a keyboard. It has these two antenna-looking things that you thread yarn through. It’s manually operated—you crank this handle across rows of needles, and it prints a row of knitted stitches. The electronic part is that you can program it to store patterns. I use knitPro to make any pattern that I want, two colors, into the machine. Most of the memory is maxed with corporate logos of sweatshop offenders, like mickey, DKNY, GAP, Nike and B for Barbie. When I do workshops, I show how it works. If you’re a knitter, it’s amazing to see how something that would take several minutes by hand, takes you a couple of seconds with the machine.
BR: Which do you prefer?
MAZZA: I think I prefer hand knitting, but that’s probably because it’s easier to control. The machine is great because it’s quick; but it’s also really problematic if you drop a stitch.
BR: Are sweatshops using knitting machines?
MAZZA: That is such a good question. Not knitting machines like this, I don’t think. These are definitely hobbyist machines. I don’t know. A lot of the handmade sweaters you would get at the Gap and stuff like that are made in sweatshop-like conditions. I know that there are hand knitters that are getting paid very little per garment. But knitting machines I’m not sure about. When I visited American Apparel this past summer I saw a knitting machine that was a tubular knitting machine, a machine that makes the part of the shirt that covers your torso.
BR: Do you have an interest to go and visit sweatshops?
MAZZA: I think it’s really difficult to do. I think at the moment, most of the microRevolt audience is people like me, people in my knitting circles. I’m excited about mobilizing knit hobbyists, it’s a privileged group in the sense that many of the people are coming from an educated, professional or consumer class, even if they live from check to check. If we keep in mind the economic subjugation of developing world laborers on first world consumption, I think it’s a meaningful group to mobilize. So at the moment, I’m more interested in that audience than I am going to a factory—although I would not turn it down if there were an opportunity. I know that it’s very difficult to get into those spaces. And even the corporations, say Nike Corporation, are not beholden to their subcontractors. As I understand it the apparel industry is not in production, they’re not in manufacturing; they’re in sort of PR. So they’re in designing and fashion, and they’re hiring models and making commercials to make the garment look great. I think there is a real need to break down these media representations as much as there needs to be organizing in factories. But actual manufacturing is subcontracted. So Nike itself might not even know—where or in what conditions their garments are being produced. This is how they get away with it, because they just subcontract it out. So it’s not something that’s easily found. I mean, if there were an opportunity to visit a sweatshop, I would want to. I’m not sure how I could actually help there though.
BR: There was this great movie that was put out by HBO Films. It was called something like Real Women Have Curves. Did you see that film?
MAZZA: Oh, no, I haven’t seen it.
BR: It takes place in East L.A. It’s about this young Mexican-American girl who is super-smart and everything, and she goes to the good school where the rich kids live. Her older sister is trying to be a designer, but she’s basically a subcontractor because that’s the only way she can make enough money to do her own designs. She runs and works in a sweatshop.
MAZZA: Right.
BR: The older sister works in the sweatshop and the mother works there. It’s this whole really interesting film about how the young daughter doesn’t want to get caught up in this way of life and how she has different aspirations. Even when the college advisor comes to see the family to say, “I think I could get your daughter into Columbia University,” they say, “Oh, no. She has to work.” After all, everyone else in the family works. You see the conditions of the sweatshop, which is this teeny little shop in East L.A., with no air circulating, and just a bunch of women who are sitting there trying to make these dresses and to pay their rent and to pay their bills. It was really fascinating; I would assume that that’s sort of what a sweatshop is like; but I’m sure it’s even worse than that.
MAZZA: Yeah. I mean, there are probably different levels of it. I know that Los Angeles is the sweatshop capital of the United States, so there’s definitely a lot in L.A., and also in New York, anywhere there is an immigrant population to exploit. Maybe it’s not as hard as I’m making it seem to get into one.
BR: When you say that you’re knitting things that accent your wardrobe, I notice that you often knit things such as leg warmers or hand warmers or gloves or a mask. They are things that accent the wardrobe; they’re not necessarily like a shirt.
MAZZA: Right.
BR: Can you talk a little bit about that?
MAZZA: Yeah. I mean, that’s kind of a production issue. You know? I haven’t made a sweater yet. I don’t know how to make sleeves. I don’t know how to read a pattern. I think the first thing I made was a Nike sweater vest. And I made that up—I didn’t follow a pattern for the garment, just for the graphics of the swoosh. The reason why they’re all leg warmers or wristbands is because I’m just learning about how to do some of these things--especially with the machine. It’s different to hand knit leg warmers, which I’ve figured out, than it is to machine knit leg warmers. The smaller things, like the wristbands, I’ve made because they’re a little bit quicker, actually. If I’m doing workshops, then you get the idea of the process, and you can take it home with you. Whereas making actual sweaters or an entire outfit would be really laborious. Right now I’m using knitting as a conceptual. So I have this thing where instead of making something really great—[an] elaborate sweater—I’ve decided to make more and more artifacts as kinds of prototypes. With knitPro and with the idea of getting people to knit the logos of sweatshop offenders, I was hoping that more expert knitters would start to get into it, and that has yet to happen. So just knitting little things right now is what’s manageable.
BR: The stuff that accents your wardrobe.
MAZZA: Yeah, I guess. But I don’t wear them that often.
BR: What do you often wear?
MAZZA: My fantasy is to make my entire wardrobe. But I’m so far behind on that.
BR: You mean even including your underwear?
MAZZA: You can buy sweat-free underwear at American Apparel, thankfully.
BR: Well, that’s true. Do you buy a lot of American Apparel?
MAZZA: I have recently, because I visited there, and it seems like one of the few companies that are making sweatshop-free clothing. Although there’s Justice Clothing, which is also really good, and there’s a place called No Sweat, which is based in Boston. So they’re out there, it’s just a matter of finding them. I think American Apparel, more than other companies, makes an effort to make trendy, cute clothes, whereas the other ones have a harder time with that, because they don’t have the advertising budget that American Apparel does.
BR: Why do you think American Apparel has done so well?
MAZZA: I think they spent a lot of time, again, on advertising. I think that Dov Charney, who’s the CEO is a smart man. It’s a good question. The idea of having a Los Angeles based company was probably pretty smart. He publicly employs illegal immigrants.
BR: As a new business model, do you feel like he’s definitely onto something?
MAZZA: Yeah, yeah. They’re sort of capitalizing on this social responsibility business model. Consumers are starting to get more conscious of that, so that’s working for them.
BR: When you talk about consciousness I think about feminism and gender and consciousness. It’s a very dated term—in terms of consciousness raising of the sixties and the seventies. It’s really terminology from the second wave of feminism. But, you’re using it in a little bit of a different way. You said that your interest is to raise consciousness about consumer awareness. Can you talk a little bit more about your appropriation of that word, of consciousness?
MAZZA: That wasn’t deliberate. I didn’t consider it to be outdated, but I like that feedback. I was trying to operate on different levels. Logoknitting hopefully makes people consider issues of authenticity, advertising, trademark, representation, making a connection between the logo, the labor process and the sweatshop. But in terms of, say the Nike Blanket— when I teach somebody to knit, there’s something illuminating that happens when you’re taking just yarn and two needles and making something of it. It’s very hard to describe. But it’s related to this idea of tacit knowledge; a silent knowledge that cannot be articulated or qualified, it can only be understood through experience. Scholars in labor studies describe factory work like this as well. So with knitting, I don’t know if that’s consciousness raising or not, but there is this level of learning how to make that I find indescribable and meaningful.
BR: The consciousness raising that was going on in the seventies, where women were sitting around in circles talking about their feelings or protesting war, and talking about women’s liberation, et cetera—I mean, to what extent has that sort of carried over into your work?
MAZZA: I’m not sure, because I wasn’t a part of that. I’m not trying to create an environment where there’s this forum where everybody agrees on some sort of universal feminist politic. It’s tricky though because the sweatshop crisis is global. It has social, cultural, political and economic implications, and microRevolt projects are not solutions. They are all kind of absurd or ironic on some level, I guess they are cultural activism not political activism, encouraging knitting as a symbolic gesture of intolerance of consumer goods made in these horrible conditions.
BR: I was talking about consumerism with someone recently; about how Americans just sort of want to buy everything. For example you may have a coat but then you see another more beautiful coat on sale and now you have two coats. You know, et cetera, et cetera. Do you think that the United States is particularly bad, in terms of consumerism? Is this why people supposedly hate us? I mean, is France better? Can you talk a little bit about consumerism, and what it means to be a consumer in the United States today?
MAZZA: Sure. Well, I can’t really speak for other countries, because I haven’t spent that much time outside of the U.S. But I do feel there is a cult of consumerism, and that people gain status based on the things that they own. Our visual culture is largely made up of advertising that creates desires for things—products, fashion, gadgets that might not arise if we weren’t so flooded with ads. It’s a problem, because obviously, there’s a deeper exchange we can have, than relating to him or her on the level of what they have or have not. At the same time, I think that people can be reminded and get excited about making things. There’s different levels of making things, and people find extreme pleasure in making clothes, food, their home or making music and videos and things like that. Like, the computer seems to have enabled—and the web, obviously-- more making. So I don’t think we’re all consumer robots, necessarily. What’s terrible about the sweatshop issue is not that people have to work, or that things are mass-produced. These are technological advances that we benefit from, all of us, in some way. What’s disturbing is that as a wealthier nation, the products we buy, largely depend on the exploitation and subjugation of third world workers. Consumers have more agency than we think, because we have purchasing power, as sinister as that sounds. If consumers demanded their products be made in decent conditions, corporations that capitalize the most on cheap labor would have to change their policies. Historically worker uprising led to better conditions, and it would be nice if Americans who have benefit from the outcome of our immigrant ancestors’ struggles—like the 8 hour work day, health insurance, weekends off, a living wage,--to support this effort. Not to say that everyone is benefiting from that here either, obviously this is a problem for many people here, too.
BR: Where else do you see your project going? Do you have other plans for other knit applications that use technology?
MAZZA: Well, it’s strange. I just went on this Red State Craft Tour. This is the first time that I worked with somebody else that also does political textile work. Jim Finn is a film and video from Chicago. He just started a series of needlepoint portraits of communist heroes from South America. Since we both do political crafts, we thought craft fairs would be an interesting space for our work. We wanted to show it where it could be appreciated on the level of its craft but also use it as a way of talking about politics. So, for me that was a great direction the project took. The tour itself was in Florida, at different craft fairs along the Florida coast. We just set up our work and tried to engage with people at the craft fairs.
BR: How did that go? Do you have any interesting anecdotes from that?
MAZZA: Our audience was probably, more often than not, sixty-plus, because of the elderly population on the Florida coast. The craft vendors at these fairs show their paintings of sailboats or jewelry or belt buckles, sometimes refrigerator magnets, and just all kinds of different crafts. What we sometimes found, because we weren’t selling anything but we were setting up near them, was —and we were taking pictures—they sometimes felt upset that we didn’t pay for a booth, or a lot of times they thought that we were taking pictures of their work to steal their work.
BR: To steal their ideas.
MAZZA: Yeah, to steal their ideas, which is really funny. We didn’t want to steal or sell anything, just talk with people about our crafts. Usually somebody who was the craft fair organizer would come up to us and say, “What are you doing here?” And, “You can’t be here. And people are upset by the pictures.” Then we would tell the conference organizers about our projects, and they were very nice and accommodating. I don’t know if it’s because it was the south or not, but they were really wonderful and polite. They would be like, “Ok, you can be here for a little while, and then you’re going to have to leave.” Twice we got banished to a food court. So there was that. But we had a hard time talking with people. It was a smile and nod audience. It was Saturday afternoon, people were looking at the crafts; they didn’t really want to talk about sweatshops or communist heroes. It was almost like an improv performance.
BR: Because the history of craft fairs is-- talking about consumerism—is that you’re going to buy. These people are hocking their wares, right? You completely turned the craft fair idea on its head.
MAZZA: What’s cool about it too is these are people that have been hand making for years. These are making a living on craft and exist in and outside consumer culture. I have tremendous respect for them. I have tremendous respect for them. It was weird competing with that micro-economy and trying to talk about politics. It was a strange relationship that we set up, but it was very interesting.
BR: So would you say it was successful?
MAZZA: I think it was successful. I think enough happened that we want to do it some more. We want to do a Red State Craft Fair where we go to all of the red states. That’s the other level of the project-- we both come from blue states and we were interested in how the media spun this idea that there’s these two ideologies in the United States; there’s this red and blue state political divide, that blue state people were out of touch with the red state heart of America. We just weren’t sure that existed. We both knew that we were doing this odd political textile work, so we thought it would be interesting to go down there and see what kind of discussion and reactions we would have. I think it would be fun to do stuff like this in Alabama or another state. It was exciting enough that we’re probably going to do something this summer with it.
BR: Go out on the road. It’s like the road show.
MAZZA: Right.
BR: Where do you see your artwork going in the next five years?
MAZZA: I want to continue to work with new media in these types of participatory projects. I also want to start NARKA, North American Radical Knitters Alliance, to develop a micro-economy of sweatshop free garments. Also, this spring I’ll be organizing a knitPro Needlecraft Art Show, a kind of outsider art exhibit of craftwork that used knitpro. I want to see what everyone is making with it. I don’t know how long I’ll do these projects around the sweatshop issue, but I’m pretty excited about it. More of the same, I guess.
BR: Tell us about the workshop that you’re going to teach at Eyebeam for girls.
MAZZA: Eyebeam has this Girls-Eye View program that I was involved in a few years ago. It deals with feminist art and history and media. What’s great about it is that we’re going to incorporate a lot of the tools that I have been developing with knitting and machines. I’m excited to see what they come up with.
BR: How will you combine technology and knitting for that?
MAZZA: Well, one thing that I didn’t talk about yet is that there are some exciting overlaps between knitting and computers and textiles and computers. Knitting is made up of two stitches, knit and pearl, so it’s a visualization of binary, every complex pattern you’ve seen is just some combination of those two stitches. Also, when they first developed loom technology, there was a mathematician, Ada Lovelace, who analyzed looms and was able to conceptualize the potential of binary code for calculations. Some consider her the first computer programmer. So I’ll try to simplify that and explain how loom technologies really led to the first computer.
BR: Explain loom technology.
MAZZA: Loom technology is the first technology that allowed for mass-producing textiles, like linens, cloth for garments, things like that. This led to the first women’s factory jobs in the United States. European immigrants came over. They came from the “family wage economy,” meaning that many came over with the same social structure of Europe. The tradition here is that men were the principal money earners, and women stayed at home and did domestic work, which also included making clothing. When loom technology developed and textile factories started opening up in the northeast in the United States, in early industrial capitalism, then…
BR: What year was this?
MAZZA: This would be late 1700s, early 1800s on, though there was ongoing waves of immigration. The textile industry offered the first factory work for women because making clothing was a feminized task before it was mechanized. Traditionally men were the breadwinners so they could justify paying women less, which was the dawn of sweatshops. Sweatshops began with the textile industry, with loom technology; essentially the same punch card technology that led us to computers. There are all these interesting relationships. The women workers that were working in the textile industry were the first to organize in outrage of the sweatshops; very similar to the sweatshop conditions that continue to exist today. For example, long hours, repetitive tasks, indecent pay and unsanitary conditions--just overwork in general. There was an uprising from these conditions that led to women’s labor rights and women’s suffrage and all kinds of really important things. What’s interesting is this issue is still a problem, still a crisis today. So, all of these issues relate, and those are the things I want to explain in the class and talk about with the work.
BR: I’m glad you talked about Ada Lovelace and the connection between computers and technology. By teaching these young girls what do you want to leave them with? What words of advice, or words of wisdom from microRevolt?
MAZZA: Well, I think the most important thing --more than learning how to knit or learning about sweatshops-- what will be more relevant for them as young girls who live in New York City--is to really look at the media and really learn media tools, because these are the tools used to influence them. If they can learn to look at the media by using it themselves critically, then they can have more agency.
BR: More agency?
MAZZA: It’s empowering to be able to interpret messages that are trying to sell you something. If you’re living in New York, you’re getting an immense amount of media a day. If they can learn how to use digital tools—which I’ll show them—then they can learn how ads are made, and learn to read these messages in a more informed way, instead of blindly taking them in, allowing them to shapes their desires.
BR: Absolutely. I was reading somewhere last night where it said knitting is like life; you continue to knit, and sometimes you drop stitches, but then you have to pick them up. So I was wondering if you could tell us in what ways is the whole idea of knitting and technology--how does it symbolize the 21st century for you?
MAZZA: I get what you’re saying about the dropping a stitch thing. There’s something
primitive and simple about knitting that is different than working with technology. You have this expectation with technology that it’s always accurate because it’s based on math and it’s based on calculations and it’s a functioning electronic machine. You expect that it’s going to have this concrete result; whereas with knitting, it’s more organic, there’s a direct human relation between the gesture of your hands and the project that comes from stitching. There’s a huge distinction. It seems like we’re moving more into this technological age, where we expect and demand information twenty-four hours a day. One of the things that I’m trying to do with microRevolt is to combine our seeming need for technology—our apparent desire for technology—with traditional craft. I’m hoping that the technologies I develop will help remind people what was really valuable and wonderful about hand made craft and consider the skilled labor that goes into our mass produced goods. I know all of these things together may sound convoluted, but I’m trying to make these kinds of connections with microRevolt.