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

Today, pattern and pattern recognition are vital algorithmic techniques for constructing meaning within large swathes of collected data. 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. 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. 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.