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In Zeros and Ones, author Sadie Plant suggests that the act of weaving was humanity's original employment of binary code. She proposes that the under/over repetitions of fabric's warp and weft are akin to the endless strings of zeros and ones that make up contemporary computer programming. This became even more apparent when weaving-looms started to use punch-card technologies, and indeed, Plant refers to these complex looms as the first computers. Her argument is that women, the primary exponents of weaving, were always already digital. With Digital String Games, I, 11 and Ill, we get to see a literal union of these hitherto disparate technologies : weaving and computers. Kept separate by boundaries of time, place, culture, and gender, two very different artists have made it their project to collide the worlds of fibre art and fibre optics. John Fairclough, a Senior Lecturer in Design at the Elam School of Fine Arts, University of Au ckland , is at the forefront of new media arts in New Zealand, and his works have been shown worldwide. Maureen Lander, a PhD candidate at the Elam School of Fine Arts, is also a Senior Lecturer in the University's Department of Maori Studies, and a highly respected installation artist. Lander's oeuvre builds primarily on her Maori ancestry, though her investigations into traditional materials and concepts are always surprising . Her recent More Scope to the Kete at the Auckland Art Gallery involved using traditional Maori flax kete or basket weaving to create kaleidoscope-shaped
cylinders. Hung on nylon threads in a room full of colored lights, the tubes, when twisted , produced swirling psychedelic patterns through the chinks in their loose weave. Digital String Games