Beautiful Old Machine

2025




The domestic knitting machine has gradually faded from the mainstream industrial market—it represents a mechanical past distinct from today’s “new machines”. Yet, might it still contain processes or information that have been gradually rendered invisible through technological advancement? I studied and challenged knitting machine’s mechanism as a way to enquire into this trajectory of technological progress.


































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Unlike design software such as Illustrator, where drawing a perfect circle can be as simple as a click, a knitting machine requires the user to translate visual content into “commands” manually encoded onto a punch card.  I altered this logic of inputting to interrupt its “precise”, “ordered”, and “looped” producction process.

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 The machine I use is a very old one, even the user manual has fallen apart. Therefore I kept thinking about its unknown history: who were its previous owners, and what they did with the machine... I became curious about the history and heritage its associated with, which led me to look into the evolution of technology, the link between old tech and new tech.





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Knitting machine is full of limitations: limited resolution, limited size of content, and limited types of products. Its primary function is to produce physical, utility pieces, and once the products are taken off from the machine, it often marks the end of the production and growth. 
However, by using it to produce letters—as a set of alphabets that can be composed into different meanings, and in a electronic format that allows more flexible transformations—the knitting machine’s production becomes a process of limitless expansion which will not have an “end”.
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: ihelaoshi@gmail.com