Cassia Powell

To be published in Needlebound Vol. 2, June 2025

pdf version

fingertips

The origin of the word “digital” comes from the Latin digitalis, meaning “pertaining to the fingers.” (1) When counting to ten, you would do so on your hands. A habitual act, to count the tips of your fingers, one that is so innately human. The act has informed the single-digit decimal systems that have been adopted across most countries of the world, stemming from the most readily available tool – a body, its hands. The linguistic bridge of technology to the human body: digitality, to be malleable to one’s touch.

When thinking about tactility, and the importance of holding a physical object, it cannot be helped to link it subconsciously with great weight and importance. Why is it that there is an inclination to associate a physical object to that of importance over something that is digital? Is it simply age? To feel the weight of something in your hands equates to something that is tangible, that is real. The world of online is intangible, abstract, and difficult to quantify. Digital culture is composed of rules and enforcements of personhood, what is verifiably human in a world of codes and numbers. The things we know that are real – the sliding of a finger over a glass screen, the outline of a slim rectangle in your jacket pocket, how many images contain a traffic light?

sl.st

With a long, complicated history of gendered labour, knitting and quilting come from an act of necessity. To build and repair cloth by hand, to blanket your family and community in warmth and security. An act of technical and tactical skill that is simply that - a given task, an act of undeniable love and servitude, no matter how physically demanding. It is a trait that has been instilled in my own family on both sides, maternally, to a point where my fingers itch if they are not in constant movement. An attitude of “yes, absolutely” when asked to repair a hem or make a hat in the winter, regardless of the state of my early stages of arthritis, regardless of my time. For my grandmothers, in a way, become dehumanized, akin to a machine.

patterns

Having grown up in the age of rapidly developing technology, it was easy to notice the cracks in technological development. The constant change becomes noticeable, then later, anticipated. You are able to adapt to the new shapes surrounding you, allowing you and your peers to bend them to your will. 

The simplicity of a gameboy with no backlights, the issues that arise from playing in the dark, later on learning how to physically disassemble the casing to install an LED screen (the nintendo DS came out less than 5 years later.) Holding music in your pocket, direct to your ears, the transition from burning an older sister’s CD to itunes, limewire, frostwire, youtube-to-mp3, the pirate bay, utorrent. Inheriting a jailbroken ipod touch from your friend because the new model has just been released, changing the passcode to the name of your crush.

To learn the back ends of different websites via online forums to present yourself virtually, leaning hard to whichever subculture unearthed itself online. It was within the screen of an imac 3G, an acer laptop, a flip phone, an LG slide, an iphone 3, 5 and 7 in which I found my identifiers. It is in the slippage of digital spaces and technology that I find myself most at home, the “out of bounds” experience that happens when you glitch out of a map in a video game.

sl.st

Patterns that have been handed down to me by each of my grandmothers are as follows: a babydoll, doll dresses, knitted blankets, a hat for my dad, a hat for my brother, gloves for my sister, the need to knit directly beside my mum, swapping tips, buttons, threads, yarn, small fragments of ourselves for others. Formulaic and infused in my blood, a need to unconditionally care for my family in lieu of myself. 

My grandmother on my maternal side, the one who sewed for a living, I didn’t speak to because of her pentecostal beliefs. A tried and true southern baptist, mum called her a “speaker of tongues”.  Since I was the child of a heathen – her daughter, my mother, I became a vessel for ignorance, an error. It wasn’t until her death in 2022 that I noticed our similarities, which I was reluctant to acknowledge. I once picked apart a pillow she made for the silk, I realized she was secretly as haphazard in her hand-stitching as I am. In the slippages of these patterns I found myself connected to something outside of myself, to something that I didn’t belong to.

interruption

When thinking of an interrupted pattern, or in Legacy Russel’s terms, a “glitch,” I consider it an “error, a mistake, or a failure to function” (2) - or something simply having gone wrong. Seeing the importance of slipping in and out of glitches, the act of exploring tenderness in digitality, touching virtual worlds and forging synthetic relationships, navigating digital realms. This glitched digitality is the interplay between technology and humanity, encompassing social and cultural exchange.

sl.st

When thinking of an interrupted pattern, I think of the ripped paper of the ancient letter containing the knitting charts given to me by my grandmother and her sisters. I think of the divide between then and now, the act of making these patterns for nobody in particular, or tailoring them to my different body, or cutting old pieces of clothing to make something new, an alternative method. While I am grateful for my skills, I am no longer an agent of direct feminine servitude, but one free of binary. One who champions rest, patchwork, incomplete projects. A glitch in a long line of labour, an interruption in the pattern of history.

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1 “Digital” Merriam Webster, accessed November 22, 2024, www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/digital

 2 Legacy Russel, Glitch Feminism: A Manifesto, (Verso Books, 2020), 15.