Above the sockets is a plan, below them is gravity

A strip of patch bay sockets, numbered 1 to 24, running straight across the top. Below it, fourteen cables hang from their plugs in loose curves, crossing one another, thinning as they fall towards the bottom edge.

Everything above the numbers was decided by someone. Everything below them was decided by gravity.

What is this, exactly?

A patch bay — a wall of sockets that lets a studio wire any input to any output without rewiring anything permanently — drawn with the cables left exactly where they fall.

The numbered row is the planned half: every socket connects to a specific piece of gear behind the panel, and the numbering is what lets an engineer patch input 6 into output 19 without knowing or caring what either one is actually wired to. The cables hanging off it are the part nobody plans. They just hang, and this drawing is honest about that rather than tidying it up.

Why do the cables hang in that particular curve?

Because a cable held at both ends and left to its own weight settles into a catenary, the same curve a chain or a power line makes — not a circle, not a parabola, a specific shape gravity produces on its own.

Every cable in the drawing thins as it falls because the ones plugged higher have further to drop before they're caught by another cable or simply run out of slack, and the crossing points are wherever two catenaries happen to intersect, not wherever a designer chose to put a crossing. It's the one part of a studio that nobody draws up in advance, because there's nothing to draw up — the shape is a consequence of hanging, not a decision.

What makes a good version of this drawing?

Letting the curves actually cross rather than routing them to avoid each other.

A tidier version would keep every cable in its own lane, and that tidiness is the wrong picture — real patch cables cross because whoever plugged them in was solving a routing problem, not composing an image, and the crossings are the visible trace of that hurry. Numbering the strip above properly, in sequence, keeps the one planned element of the drawing readable even while everything under it is left loose.

Can a real patch bay's layout go on a shirt?

A numbered strip and the cables hanging off it are a working method, and nobody owns a method.

What belongs to somebody is a specific manufacturer's panel design, their printed labelling scheme or a studio's own named routing — that's a designed product, licensable the ordinary way if a real one is the point of the shirt. A plain numbered strip with no maker's name on it stays a drawing of how patching works rather than of whose rack it is.

Does this only make sense to someone who's used a patch bay?

Anyone who's ever routed signal by hand recognises the shape of it — a telephone switchboard, an old broadcast desk, any system where connection was made by physically placing something between two points rather than by software.

It also reads on its own terms to someone who's never patched anything: a row of order above a tangle of consequence is a familiar enough shape that it doesn't need the job explained first.

Isn't a tangle of cables just clutter, not a design?

Only if the top row is missing. With it, the cables read as the deliberate other half of a deliberate system, not as mess.

The numbering is what turns gravity into information — it tells the eye that everything below was allowed to fall exactly where it wanted precisely because everything above it was pinned down with that much precision. Remove the numbers and it would just be a drawing of cables. With them, it's a drawing of a decision that was made once, at the top, and left alone below it.

Does it print well?

Yes — flat colour per cable and a strip of clean lettering are both artwork that survives fabric without a gradient anywhere.

Slate as a ground with cream for the panel, plus red and yellow reserved for individual cables, keeps the crossing curves distinguishable from each other rather than reading as one mass. This runs the same discipline as a synth panel's arcing cords in three colours: enough hues to separate the lines, not so many that the print turns busy.

How do I get one made?

Describe the patch bay at JustOG — how many sockets, how many cables, and which colours to run through them.

Pick a direction, drag the crop frame, see it composited on the real garment, and it's made to order and shipped.

Designs other people have published are in the shop.

Fourteen curves under twenty-four numbers, and not one of the curves drawn on purpose.