Meet me in the soft space between 0 and 1: On quilting bees and errant recognition

Romi Ron Morrison is an interdisciplinary artist and scholar whose work investigates the personal, political, ideological, and spatial boundaries of race, gender, and social infrastructure within digital technologies. Using maps, data, sound, and performance, they center Black diasporic technologies that resist the reduction of land to property and people to data. Their projects engage theories of Black Computational Thought, entropy, and kinship amid uncertainty. Morrison has exhibited and lectured internationally, including at Transmediale, MIT, and the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago. They are an Assistant Professor in Design Media Arts at UCLA and a 2024–2026 Just Tech Fellow.

Quilts represent one of the most highly evolved systems of writing in the New World. Every combination of colors, every juxtaposition or intersection of line and form, every pattern, traditional or idiosyncratic, contain data that can be imparted in some form or another to anyone. All across Africa, geometric designs, the syntax of quilt tops, have been used to encode symbolic or secret knowledge. (Arnett)

Pattern holds the mark of our attention, suturing together things apparent and discordant, clear and mercurial. In data studies, pattern takes on a particular significance to determine what can be properly transmitted, encoded, decoded as signal, and what remains unstructured excess—discarded as noise. ¹ Data, as the structured organizational form of information, is a matter of pattern. In short, that which can be arranged in a clear, repeatable pattern is given meaning; that which cannot is errant, meaningless, and disposable. As computing technologies grew during the Cold War, pattern continued to determine meaning not only in information but also in the arrangement of urban space, reason, and vision (Julesz; Lynch; Halpern; McPherson). Today, pattern and pattern recognition continue to be vital algorithmic techniques for constructing meaning within large swathes of collected data. When regularities in data are found, the features of the pattern are extracted and then used for future prediction and decision making. Pattern is prediction. However, the act of recognition invites political, epistemological, and aesthetic questions of what constitutes patterned meaning and what must be elided to cohere that meaning (Steyerl). As algorithmic techniques continue to be used, violently managing human life, we need expanded ways to engage meaning beyond the narrow confines of what a machine is able to recognize or not as pattern (Eubanks; Noble; O’Neil). Moreover, as these decisions are increasingly made in the abstract we need to rematerialize the practices of building trust and sharing information that have sustained life through an age of capture and growing precarity.

Put simply, how do we begin to rebuild the skills needed to be in relation to risk and to each other? To share the burden of navigating the uncertain and the unexpected? If at best, the promissory prediction of computing merely offsets its worst violences now displaced to other parts of the world through special trade zones, cobalt mines, lithium fields, water privatization, enslaved labor, and genocidal targeting; or at worst, marks you directly as the target to be an excised exemplar of justified violence—the criminal now ascertained before the crime (predictive policing), the deviant worker—now fired before having the job (sentiment analysis in worker disciplining), or the child revolutionary—now murdered before they are able to lead (automated targeting in Gaza). Under the staggering weight of ineptitude, the woeful state of “ethics” when uttered in the same passing statement as computation, perhaps now we can finally let go of the promise. The promise that our protection may not require us. The promise that we can all find sanctuary through penance to a higher power—a pure rationality—father, son, and Holy Spirit. Perhaps it is best to remain unrecognized by such a rationality. To carve the interior spaces denied us from within the misrecognition of our own assumed irrationality—to cleave back a space so full that it appears empty. ²

I am concerned with the potential for misrecognition because it is the place from which I often speak, from the folded crenulations of a femme interiority that can only be evasively glimpsed in the worn creases of an envelope that spells protection. In that misrecognition I find temporary hospice in contours too tight to remain, in oblique angles and indirection that scream expiry—a relation to femme that from the outside appears desultory and apophenic. I enter these too tight spaces knowing the irresolution that they confer—not as a desire to be seen- but a desire for the affront to singularity that errantry can provide—to linger in the folds of something not yet announced—that thrives from the resound of granulated noise and fuzzy boundaries. But this irresolution—this misrecognition is not home—is not resolve—is not resilience—it is a haunting love affair with incompletion—the ability to be both more and less than what appears, than what can be gleaned, assumed, and confirmed by the eye. To bend the arithmetic to something beyond 0 and 1, negation and excess. A quotient of infinitesimally small and continuing dividends. I do not wish to alleviate this misrecognition but to grow its bounds to become the voluminous expanse from which others whittle their narrowness - what we may call recognition, being seen, actualization, subjection, fact, person, Man. A sounding seeking depth but not numeration. For if I must be subsumed by the language of pattern let it be one that frays and breaks in the rhythm of off-beat syllables and misplaced phonemes. An elongated sibilance that sucks teeth and smiles knowingly.

From the inside out

Wrestling with the epistemological claims of computing, scholar David Golumbia makes a helpful distinction between computation and computationalism. For him computationalism “is the view that not just human minds are computers but that mind itself must be a computer—that our notion of intellect is, at bottom, identical with abstract computation, and that in discovering the principles of algorithmic computation via the Turing Machine human beings have, in fact, discovered the essence not just of human thought in practice but all thought in principle.” (Golumbia 7). For Golumbia, computationalism captures and reduces all notions of thinking to an internal abstract and enclosed rationality. Computationalism allows Golumbia to show the ways that the digital computer inherits much of its logic from a post-enlightenment high rationality. By engaging the work of Decartes, Hobbes, Kant, and Liebnitz, Golumbia positions this rationality; “computationalism entails not merely rationalism per se, but a particular species of rationalism with clear conceptual and historical weight, which we nevertheless seem all too ready to forget” (Golumbia 190).

The rationality that Golumbia urges us to remember relies on a colonial logic of interiority/exteriority (da Silva). Combing through the canon of post-enlightenment thought, Denise Ferreira da Silva locates interiority as the privileged site of thought and reason expressed through acts of cognition. The mind is an inherently internal thing and is distinctly separate from exteriority. Exteriority defines everything else beyond the mind as affectable, lacking self-determination and subjected to the regulative force of reason, natural law, and the justified violence of conquest. Put another way, beings with interiority are those that act and think. ³ Beings subjected to exteriority are those that are acted upon and thought about, succumb to the noisy surround.

As many have made clear, the bounds of this interiority are heavily curtailed to position sixteenth-century white European cis-hetero men as the primary disciples of interiority, given special dominion over the affectable dammed of the rest of the globe (Wynter; da Silva; Jackson; Fanon; McKittrick). This positions interiority as a privileged site available only to those of recognized rationality and able to properly inhabit the category Man (da Silva; Wynter).

Interiority/exteriority sits as the foundational logic that subtends conquest and is articulated through a shifting series of encoded signifiers; rational/irrational, selected/dysselected, pure/hybrid, human/animal, civilized/savage, free/slave, deserving/undeserving, innocent/criminal, citizen/migrant, signal/noise. While the specific signifiers may change over time, the interiority/exteriority divide reproduces itself repeatedly as a pattern stretching from the interior gaze of Man to the computational gaze of sorting algorithms. ⁴ Here interiority remains privileged as the primary site from which to make rational claims and is extended from the consciousness of Man to the newly divinized computational power of machine learning algorithms. This flattens ontology as singular and epistemology as observable. Pattern is one way that meaning is made from exteriority. Through the process of pattern recognition exteriority is the site of extraction from which patterns can be formulated and meaning expressed. Pattern, then, is not only a technical method for making meaning through data aggregation, but simultaneously acts as a juridic arbiter of who is recognized (a signal deserving of protection) and who is discarded (the threat of noise from which signal is to be protected).

What follows is a provocation of flesh and thread over bit and byte, of the overlapping aesthetics of encoding and sharing information that take flight through Black femme material textile cultures. In this work, I evoke patterning as a vital Black Feminist technology for strategic misrecognition, giving attention to improvisational aesthetics of pattern breaking and adaptation that maintain interiority through the breaking of uniform aesthetics and legibility, mobilized along the edges of their assumed illegibility. ⁵ It is work that dares us to remain unrecognizable to machinic gazes. In particular I work from Kara Keeling's concept of the Black femme function to speculate towards a mode of pattern making and information sharing that hold open the space for a differently articulated interiority, not singularly sequestered in the confines of a mind deracinated from the body, but held in the relation of quilting circles and the boisterous conversations that embrace overdue reunions. In the following sections, I take up Keeling's concept as a play on the interior/exterior framing of this introduction, making space for strategic forms of misrecognition pointing to a alternative arrangement of pattern and knowledge existing beyond the bounds of Man's interiority. Keeling's Black femme function makes possible an interiority that exists because it is misread as illegible noise requiring different social relations to be understood. The next section takes up this focus on interiority and illegibility as it manifests through the non-repeating patterns of Black women's quilt designs. Here I emphasize the form of the strip quilt and the various engagements with uncertainty and improvisation used in their construction that may appear as clangor from the outside. Here, the exterior surface of the quilts read as noise allows for interior forms of meaning to circulate and spread. Lastly, I end with a reflection on Luisah Teish's recounting of gumbo ya-ya as a contextual and relational form of information sharing which resound as prattle to the uninitiated. Moving across these three sections, I hope to recover practices of errant recognition that alter and modulate expected patterns to the extent that they surface as broken interiors, discarded as being void of meaning. In doing so this work takes up the potential for taking advantage of misrecognition and finding shared interiors in the femme functions of Black patterning.

Black femme function and sensual excess

In Kara Keeling's celebrated text The Witch's Flight: The Cinematic, the Black Femme, and the Image of Common Sense, she introduces the term black femme function as a strategic moment of misrecognition. The Black femme function “represents affectivity's capacity to disturb the reproduction of social life by insisting on the existence of alternatives to existing organizations of social life, even if those alternatives are deemed irrational…” (Keeling 137). This takes up irrationality not as pathology but as an indication of the limits for what post-enlightenment interiority can claim to know. More so, it is that limitation that produces a misrecognition, seeing what it doesn’t understand as irrational and illegible, rather than what it is; a disruption of the reproduction of social life and a demand for an alternative. In her analysis of the film Set It Off she gives attention to the butch-femme relationship between characters Cleo and Ursula. Keeling is clear that her interest in butch-femme is not a question of identity but of what such categories produce within common sense as well as the alternatives they engender through their production. ⁶ In particular she focuses on one of the closing scenes where Ursula witnesses and grieves the televised murder of her butch lover Cleo at the hands of the LAPD. In this scene the value of Cleo's life is subsumed by the officially sanctioned acts of the state to kill. Keeling notes how this scene of state sanctioned killing “confirms that Cleo's death itself is the official pronouncement on her life” (Keeling 135). When Ursula reacts with raw grief and sorrow her affect “insists that there are things about Cleo that the official common sense visibility on the television screen cannot know or will not recognize about Cleo's life” (Keeling 135). ⁷

At the same time, at the moment of Cleo's death Ursula's grief points to an alternative relation of life that transpired off screen, out of view of the audience, existing within the diegetic time of the film but beyond its common sense. In doing so it delimits what can be understood in the common sense productions of femme that we previously saw throughout the film; Ursula is silent, alluring, and exotic; existing only in relation to Cleo. What we don’t see isn’t absent but exists beyond the confines of that particular knowability. Through Ursula's grief we catch a glimpse of the deep meaning that Cleo had in her life and the value of Cleo's life existing in the possibility of an alternate social reality that can’t be gleaned within the common sense reality of the film. Within the spatial dichotomy of interiority/exteriority this Black femme function points to an alterity of understanding that holds the formation of alternate social formations and ways of knowing that happen off-screen and are out of view from the gaze of interior Man and his associated common senses. Man in his singular claims to interiority is entombed in a kind of knowing that can’t be bothered to be curious about what it doesn’t know or understand. This points to the limits of post-enlightenment interiority as a means of knowing that doesn’t simply discern knowledge about the observable world but produces it within a limited set of epistemological conditions. Within the purview of the interior thinking subject overrepresented as Man, Ursla is misrecognized within it's own malnourished understanding of femme as a passive, sexualized object. A reading of Ursla through a Black femme interiority would recognize what is deafeningly communicated through her perceived silence:

In a moment of being misrecognized, assumed to already be known, I move beyond your limited understanding and through the eros of haughty kisses in dim lit corners, enveloped in the last place you would ever think to look. I point to something else made possible that exists off screen- not absent but inconceivable within the narrowness of your sclerotic and fetid knowing. Mine is a femme interiority that trades in the abundance of your hubris and prefers to wander in voluminous space just beyond the narrow alleys of your subjection.

The Black femme function is attuned to an understanding of common sense visibility in a way that simultaneously points beyond it- misrecognized as that which is unpatterned, extraneous, and noisy. Ursula's silence is in fact deafening and points to a noisy errantry that exists beyond the frame, beneath the surface, and out of view.

Writing on the out of view practices of the enslaved Saidiya Hartman refers to these off screen gatherings as “stealing the meeting” and “stealing away.” She elaborates writing, “Stealing away was the vehicle for the redemptive figuration of the dispossessed individual and community, reconstructing kin relations, contravening the object status of chattel, transforming pleasure, and investing in the body as a site of sensual activity, sociality, and possibility, and, last, redressing the pained body” (Hartman 66).

Under the cover of an elsewhere the enslaved maintained their social ties through praise meetings, quilting parties, dances, and meeting friends and lovers on neighboring plantations. Out of view of Man's interior gaze there is a sensuousness and an affect of the unlicensed and effusive. This ability to fall out of recognition and into the exterior also foster the sites for clandestine reunions. In the noise of the exterior something infrasonic is made possible, hailing only those tuned to its particular pitches and hollars. Hartman uses the term Black noise as an aural gathering of Black voices through shrieks and moans that exceeds legibility within liberal humanist blindsight. The goal of this work is not to render such voices as legible but to respect their polyrhythmic cadences and to find the discrete infinities between social and corporeal death, between 0 and 1. This practice gives form to an interiority that is multi-voiced and polyphonic. It is contentious and cacophonous, able to weave and re-weave into misrecognized forms. Pattern becomes adapted from its insistence on clear repeatability and instead holds our attention to the multiple forces that subtend its form.

Adaptive patterns and veiled recognition

Patterning as the gerund form of pattern marks something on-going. In their text, “Aesthetic Principles of Afro-American Quilts,” Maude Southwell Wahlman and John Scully describe patterning as, “A textile aesthetic which has been passed down for generations among Afro-American women who were descendants of Africans…Afro-American quilts do not seem interested in a uniform color scheme. They use several methods of playing with colors to create unpredictability and movement” (Wahlman, Scully 86). Wahlman and Scully note that Black women's quilting practices disrupt ethno-European standards of uniformity. Instead, they engage in a series of different mixed methods to imbue their creations with unpredictability and movement as inherited and translated through kinship ties to ancestors in the Middle Passage.

Many Black women quilters described their choices as coming from a desire to first study and perfect different Euro-American designs in order to then break and bend them, staging patterns with multiple rhythms and movements, making the space for the unpredictable. Whereas Euro-American patterns are based in aesthetics that privilege uniformity through measurement, Black women emphasize variation and rhythmic aesthetics that create off-beat patterns. While this is often achieved through various kinds of improvisation, improvisation is not an act of virtuosic performance that comes from nowhere. Instead it is a rigorous act of repetition, until the pattern becomes a part of muscle memory expressed through fingertips and discerning eyes, allowing the space for unpredictability to then emerge. Improvisation works as a form of preparation in this context, preparing to meet the uncertainty of what exceeds the aesthetic and structural logics of the uniformed pattern. This excessive flow that spills beyond the edges of uniformed patterns is what holds my interest. It is a means of holding uncertainty without the promise of prediction.

Writing on the influence of off-beat patterning in African textiles, Roy Sieber describes a weave from the Upper Volta as “a superb example of seemingly random placement of pattern. However, the careful matching of the ends of the cloth dispels the impression of an uncalculated overall design” (Sieber 190). The patterns in the weaves that Sieber describes give the impression of random disorder to the uninitiated. However, there is calculation in the assumed disorder. Because of this irresolution in the pattern something else is allowed to emerge. The encoding of covert information or data within plainsight is known as steganography. Within computer science, digital steganography is used to conceal data within digital carriers such as text files, images, or audio. Steganography plays with and subverts the expectations of recognition. There is a latency between how something is read, what it purports to be, and what it is, even momentarily. The benefits of intentionally being misread. Not seeking opacity per say but fictive transparency, to cloak or be patterned as something else. The space where pattern recognition is overtaken by patterning. In particular, I am concerned with diasporic forms of patterning that emerge from the hull, coterminous with Blackness itself.

One of the most fundamental pieces of such diasporic patterning is the predominance of fabric strips within weaving and quilt-making practices. The strip is a long, usually narrow piece of cloth either cut or woven that spans the length of a quilt top. It is a key structuring component for quilt top and weaving designs. Maude Southwell Walhman and John Scully note the ways that the strip is a key structuring and aesthetic device. Strips rather than blocking or the use of appliques prioritize speed and work as “time-savers.” When applied to large scale designs strips are often used to structure composition by being added in between larger elements. They can also be used adaptively to extend or build upon an already existing pattern. The strip is a structural element that thrives on variation, improvisation, and polyrhythms. This is most evident through the use of contrast and color. In documenting Black women's quilt-making aesthetics, Wahlman and Scully emphasize the ways that color is used to create unpredictability and movement. Often they evoke the musicality of the quilts as producing multiple movements, polyrhythms, notes, and off beat-phrasing. Through such aesthetic devices the whole of the design, the symmetry within the composition isn't found through uniformity but through contrast and difference. Black women speaking about such designs describe a desire to first perfect a pattern in order to then break or bend it through improvisation, inviting acts of repetition and modulation. Contradiction is held within the layering and overlaying of contrasting patterns of color to produce forms that carry multiple voices and askew beats. The contradictions in color and pattern aren’t resolved, instead they give form to something else, quilts encrypted with code. This makes the space for pattern to emerge as an irresolvable but workable form, it still does something, and even more it does something because of its irresolution. It is this ability to hold contradictions that gives form to repetitive practices of piecing together ephemera so that moments of improvisation, off-beat patterning, and movement can bend and break Euro-American designs. For this reason Black women's quilting practices and patterning model a powerful method for reworking the centrality of pattern within information and computer science.

Noisy misrecognitions

For Laurent Berlant, recognition is the degree of misrecognition you can bear. Meaning recognition is always an act of reduction that conceals the space between the totalizing designations of 0 or 1. This does not mean to languish in illegibility but to craft an interiority that can only exist in the creases of obstreperous dins and is discarded as noise. The threat of this interiority lies in its ability to be misrecognized or overlooked. It is to take advantage of the hubris that dismisses you as irrelevant and unvalued. One example that may help ground some of this is in the practice of gumbo ya ya. Gumbo ya ya is a communication practice borne from creole traditions in New Orleans. As well as a practice it is often considered a phrase or expression meaning, “Everybody talks at once.” In Luisah Teish's Jambalaya: The Natural Woman's Book of Personal Charm and Practice Rituals she tells a story about returning home to visit her family after a long time away and the way that gumbo ya ya works as soft re-initiation back to her familial ties. As she lands at the airport and is greeted by family they gather in a makeshift circle and everyone proceeds to begin speaking, catching Luisah up on all the matters she has missed in her time away. Most crucially this is done simultaneously. Each person telling a different story orients Luisah to others in the circle that are a part of the information. To an outsider, one uninitiated in the practice this can seem overwhelming and cacophonous, making the plot, the details, and any sense of linearity hard to follow. Instead gumbo ya ya is spoken in a way that understands the centrality of those involved, their place, in the circle and the story as essential to the information. It is not extraneous metadata that can be mined or parsed or contained elsewhere preserving an aspirational purity of the message itself. In this context information flows through the circuitous routes of social relations. Which is to say that the network is relational and the information moves accordingly. More importantly as each person is involved in telling their story they are simultaneously talking and listening, sending and receiving, parallel processing in play. Which means that each person is involved in numerous acts of improvisation in the exchange of information, calibrating different moments, tuned to each family member coming into or leaving the circle. The nature of the information itself is not static but moves through processes of kin, shifting and taking form in the improvised choreography of gumbo ya ya. Transmission is an act of relation and requires presence. To the uninitiated it appears as noise. But noise also marks something else. Something beyond the present frame of knowability. Noise is what we call something that evades an easy categorization. In that sense it is the precondition for something that acts before the confines of definition and enclosure take place, the lull before recognition. Noise is the evasion of recognition. Under the cover of exteriority something else is allowed to be transmitted, encoded, and decoded that works beyond the logics of a dominant culture (Hall).

Touching on this moment from Teish's text, Elsa Barkley Brown remarks on the improvisational cadence to gumbo ya ya as one that is polyrhythmic in nature. Likening it to a jazz ensemble, the sharing of information becomes a deeply contingent and reflexive practice like editing and adapting in order to maintain and flow through the social relationships of those present. To sever those ties is to make the information meaningless. There is no information free floating detached from the speaking or listening source. It is always in dialogue, not an entity in itself but an emergent property that emboldens and resonates across the beings that share ties together. This focus on the relational is not to deploy a mere poetics or a vague hint at an ethics but instead is an affront to the very vital severing between people, land, ritual, and community that has been such a key colonial tactic for expropriation and conquest. These are terrestrial needs that can’t be transcended. There is not an escape into the universal. This relational and contingent understanding of what information is works to show the particularities of Man's interior formulations and the givenness of how we presently understand data as a resource to be mined, processed, and capitalized on. This can only happen once the material and relational considerations have been thoroughly severed and deracinated. It is the pallid reduction of a vibrant matter made meaningful in practice to a fungible commodity whose value comes through exchange.

In this quick review, I see the Black femme function, improvisational patterning, and gumbo ya ya as informational practices that vary greatly from computation's need for accumulating vast amounts of data and information. These various modes for taking refuge or inciting movement function through that which has already been dismissed as being impossibly meaningless. It is an agonistic gesture for appropriating the limited contours of Man's recognition of itself. Not to evade or contest, but to wear their warped expectations of us as a protective veil cloaking our furtive movements for escape and finding life in the crevices of their kneaded ignorance. However, my invocation of gumbo ya ya as a different process for encoding, transmitting, and decoding information is not in the aim of showing a diverse or pluralist range of data practices. Instead, it is to ask the relational question of what continued practices of conquest and the severing of peoples, lands, rituals, and practices were necessary for data to become a detached commodity cleansed from context? How was such a violent engulfment, that expels context, a required step for the building of the datum. Such countenance for gumbo ya ya would then invite different data cultures from which different meanings, practices, and accountabilities of information become necessary. For this reason gumbo ya ya is a bulwark against the inured and narrow interventions into junk bad data rife with the vested and inextricable violences of plantation and colonial logics. Rather gumbo ya ya as an informatics of Black Computational Thought offers a relational understanding of what was engulfed through violence in order to winnow and enclose our present engagement with information, data, and computation. ⁸ This shift then opens computing to other genres of practice and abandons the telos of techno capitalism into an arch of the unanticipated and wild. Back into the contingent and relational, back to the partial affordances of misrecognition that grant if only momentarily a femme interiority to describe what happens beneath the veil, just out of focus and outside of the frame—the potential to circulate before the regulatory force of reason demands recognition.