One Row At A Time: Knitting An American Flag

Artist David Cole has created a knitting machine of two John Deere excavators holding 25-foot aluminum light poles serving as knitting needles. This knitting machine is knitting a 20 foot wide US flag, which is expected to be completed at noon today. This is all part of an exhibit at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art in North Adams. The exhibit includes a miniature depiction of the knitting machine as well as Cole?s "Memorial Flag", a 5-foot by 9-and-a-half-foot flag that was designed with "about 18,000 toy soldiers melded together under a gleaming coating of red, white, and blue."

The flag has the power to generate differing perspectives, according to Cole?s quote in the Globe article.

"Within the same piece, you might be making one statement and then making a contradictory statement. Both are true. It?s not something in between. Somehow it?s both. The flag is a symbol of hope and promise and what Army recruiters would like you to think. And it?s a symbol of shortsighted, greedy international behavior. It always has been. I like that the flag means a lot of things."