Cat Mazza’s art has always combined craft, technology, and historical research in some way.

In the early 2000s, she made knitPro with programmer Eric St. Onge. It’s a free web-based program that translates digital images into stitch patterns, which users then knit, weave, or embroider.

In 2006, she created Knitoscope, a moving image version of knitPro that Mazza calls “my favorite brush.” The program converts digital video into knitted animations, and By & By: With Psychedelic Features, her latest video work, was made with it.

In a conversation about Cat Mazza: Network, Gallery 360 staff member Claire Ogden joined the artist and curator Amy Halliday for a chat about Mazza’s historical research, the early internet, and the compelling differences between knitPro and the Knitoscope.

This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.

Historical research as artistic practice

Ogden: Thank you for making the time to chat! I’m curious, when did you start getting into history as part of your artistic practice?

Mazza: I’m actually a women’s studies graduate school dropout, so one of my alternate paths could have been in women’s labor history. My studio art program in undergrad really emphasized conceptual rigor, and for me that’s always involved creating work informed by history in some way.

Amy Halliday: Yes, that sense of deep research and time spent with archival materials. Those are definitely things that attracted me to your work. There’s a wonderful combination of depth, nuance, and serendipity that comes out of your research. Sometimes it’s playful, and other times it’s profound and provocative. But often, it’s all three!

Your work has its own methodological form that doesn’t look like that of a history professor. It doesn’t have that particular kind of linearity. And that’s what I think is also special about it: it’s relatable, and it feels like a form of storytelling rather than a form of reportage or documentation.

I’m also really drawn to your insistence on agency, which I think is linked to how you think about and “do” history. You really emphasize an idea of art and craft as a form of agency, and as a means of recognizing and celebrating agency in others—whether it’s facilitating small acts of subversive stitching or tracing histories of collective action.

Ogden: That very much resonates with what I was feeling and seeing myself. And I think connection and communication are big throughlines for me: craft and the act of assembly as something that brings people together, bringing them out of confining conditions. I feel like that’s kind of a throughline as well, from the literal context of psychiatric institutions, to labor organizing, to the Pandemic Views project.

Halliday: That’s beautiful. Especially thinking about confining conditions, whether it’s from the very specific confinement of mental health inpatient facilities or shelter in place orders, or what can be an overwhelming sense of isolation in the everyday struggle of ‘How do I go about making change around this issue?’

Art is a way out, or through. There’s an expansiveness to it.

And of course, that makes me think too about the exhibition’s title, ‘network,’ which is about expansiveness and connection rather than confinement. Whether it’s networks of knowledge transfer or exchange—as in many of the global patterns you see appear in Cat’s work—or the bringing together of craft hobbyists and traditions, different people, different geographies, maybe even across time. These works—and the online applications you mentioned earlier—literally create networks across time and space in ways that are interesting and generative.

The early internet

Ogden: Cat, I’ve loved hearing you talk about the early Internet with such enthusiasm, and about the design of your website and how you decided to keep it ‘retro.’

I feel like there’s so much pessimism about the Internet now. What are your thoughts on that? Are you an Internet pessimist?

Mazza: I do miss the anonymity and experimentation of the early Internet. I remember the sort of awe of global audiences connecting for the first time.

I’m an outlier in that I have never been on social media. But I do have a teenage son who is on TikTok, and I worry about the AI-generated content he’s consuming. And yet I also think it’s incredible that my nine-year-old daughter can make a slideshow on public art using AI.

Things are still interestingly bizarre on the Internet. I think it’s always been a space for that.

Ogden: Totally. I think we all have such individual experiences of the Internet now, with our algorithmically influenced feeds. So there’s intense effects to that. We can’t even have a conversation about the Internet without talking about three totally different things!

Halliday: Yeah, the creative experimentation and bizarreness of the early Internet. It’s just a moment that you can’t get back, right? I think it felt quite liberating.

But [now] there is a sense that things are out of control, and they’re steering you. They’re coercing you. And there wasn’t that sense of coercion in the early Internet.

I think Cat’s early applications really play with that liberation. They’re about giving people creative possibilities rather than coercing the form that they take or the direction that they pursue.

Public use of knitPro

Halliday: Have people used knitPro in unexpected ways, Cat? I’m really curious if they still use it, or if they’re now using it differently from how it started being used. What’s been the story of knitPro over the years?

Mazza: So in early Google Analytics—and I’m talking about maybe 2010—I was able to track some sort of global use. And most of the users were based in Europe and the U.S. but also in Africa, Asia, and South America.

The early usage had the flare of craft hobbyist culture: lo-fi digital imagery, celebrities or sports teams and Harry Potter stuff. Someone needle-crafted an entire Hogwarts using knitPro. My favorite contact was from Cambodian artisans that were using knitPro to sample imagery from Buddhist temples into their weaving.

Halliday:  And then there has also been the protest element of usage, with semi-co-ordinated projects and “microRevolts” like the making of ‘logoknits,’ or knitted garments with the logos of sweatshop offenders that could be consolidated into something like the Nike Blanket Petition (2003-2008).

Mazza: In the 2010s, I did also spend a lot of time circulating to different art schools that had textile or fiber programs. The projects went to various labor organizing spaces, activist and craft venues, and eventually some art and design museums.

Several years in, I asked Eric St. Onge, who is the programmer of knitPro, to create an archive. I have access to the folder, to the day, of all the PDFs generated. I used to do this live in talks: I’d be like, “what did people just make?”

Halliday: I think that’s really interesting, because you are also generating a crowd-sourced archive, even if it remains largely unseen. I uploaded two random things this morning, so now I’m a little bit embarrassed. I wanted to see what kind of resolution came out, but I think I put overly ambitious images in.

Mazza: Right. So I think the reason why it’s maintained usability is because, if you’re making imagery in a sweater, even, it needs to be really compressed and low resolution.

Halliday: Totally. The reality of making it manageable, I think, is what the program does well.

It’s fascinating to hear that it’s still being used. I was wondering if you get a little ping or something every time, or if you have to go in and look for it?

Mazza: It’s all stored onto a folder on our server organized by date and time.

I do sometimes get emails like, “I’m trying to do this. Can you help?”

Twenty years later, thousands of patterns get uploaded every week from international craft hobbyists. If I search Valentine’s Day 2025, I see Snoopy, a porcupine, floral motifs and geometries, the feminist symbol, a mustached man, a sign that says “Love Long and Prosper” and more.

Pandemic Views would be a somewhat recent moment in the scheme of knitPro. That’s the participatory project where people submitted a photograph of their view during early shelter in place orders in 2020, which I then turned into a stitchable image. We were drawing on long histories of using needlework to combat anxiety and “idleness” during times of uncertainty. I’m excited to have that project on view as part of this exhibition.

The story of Knitoscope

Ogden: On another note. I’ll ask this, because lots of students are asking it during our gallery tours. How was the actual video itself made before you put it into Knitoscope?

Mazza: So Knitoscope lets you take video footage—we could do an image pan of a room or just an interview of somebody talking—it takes that moving image, lowers the resolution, and maps a stitch over it. So it appears like animated stitches.

The source can be multiple moving images, or, for By & By, I mostly approached it like an animated digital drawing. So they’re mostly my own digital designs crafted pixel by pixel, a lot of them, but there’s some sampling. And there’s clips of static from the CRT monitors and segments of rain becoming a downpour layered over landscapes. It’s a variety of things.

Halliday: That sounds incredibly painstaking. Can you tell me what that looks like? How long does it take you to make a frame?

Mazza: I use Procreate to draw with an Apple Pencil on the iPad, and I can get frames that way.

And sometimes I’m building objects and structures kind of pixel by pixel in Photoshop, and sometimes I’m illustrating landscapes, like the Bicêtre Hospital General from the Tony Robert-Fleury painting, or Basaglia’s “negated institutions” in Trieste, or the community center Kingsley Hall.

Halliday: I love that. There’s so much unseen labor and creative sampling that goes into your work that people don’t always understand, because the finished product seems so integrated. Do you have a vague estimate of how long something like By & By would have taken you?

Mazza: I started making it in January, and I finished it in August or September.

Halliday: So I’m thinking like a couple hundred hours?

Mazza: Yeah, I would say hundreds of hours, but I’m not really sure.

Halliday: When and how do you work?

Mazza: If I’m doing digital drawing, I can do that on the iPad, which is portable. If I’m doing Knitoscope, I usually like to be in the studio with the monitor size that I like.

Ogden: That’s great. So it’s like your playground, and then you also get to be in your element. Your Mazza cave, if you will.

For my last question, I’d love to talk about Knitoscope. In contrast to the very open, freely usable knitPro, I’ve been told that Knitoscope is not publicly usable. Is there a story there?

Mazza: Yeah, there’s more than one story there! So I did get in a trademark battle with the knitting needle company “KnitPro,” and that was somewhat stressful. I do maintain the trademark in the USA because we could prove our first use.

Maybe it’s helpful to say Knitoscope is sort of an interior world for me. It’s like my favorite brush. So there’s this personal sort of connection to it that feels important to me, and to my practice.

Halliday: I do feel like Knitoscope is akin to a unique medium and process that you’ve developed in a way that’s very different from KnitPro.

Especially when I look at your recent work like By & By, it does feel kind of trademarked, but only in my head. It just feels totally unique to you.

Mazza: Knitoscope is on my desktop, and I just worked with the programmer Shawn Lawson to upgrade it. Now, it exports higher resolution imaging of the fiber and has more flexibility in customizing stitches, allowing for a range of colors and a flexible scale and interlocking stitches.

It’s a very different version than the first version. It’s a little bit technical but to me it feels very new, like a playground.

Halliday: I love that you said it’s a playground, because in By & By, there’s something really playful in those little screens that I love. And I appreciate that there are these playful elements in your work that are very human and very relatable in the midst of dealing with some difficult topics.

Mazza: As someone who loves needlework and the experience of making it and viewing it closely. . .There were definitely worlds that I wanted to build using Knitoscope with the By & By piece that were really fun to do, even though, like you said, the topic was a bit hard, even dark at times.

Halliday: Yeah, but I don’t think that’s the first thing that comes up. It doesn’t feel dark, necessarily.

I think that polysensory element that you were going for is very much more like an imaginative captivation that draws people in rather than making you feel like, oppressed by something. It’s very inviting.

I just love watching it. And there’s something different that stands out to me every time.