Digital String Games II
20 July – 20 August 2000
Fisher Gallery, Pakuranga, Auckland
Digital String Games III
18 November – 18 December
Casula Powerhouse, Sydney

Review by Tessa Laird, first published in Eyeline magazine, Summer 2000/2001
 

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, II and III, 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 Auckland, 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 divulged swirling psychedelic patterns when twisted, through the chinks in their loose weave.

Digital String Games II continued this extrapolation of the traditional into the psychedelic. Digital String Games I premiered at ISEA98 in Liverpool, but the work was substantially reconfigured for the Fisher Gallery (and has been updated a third time for a more recent incarnation at the Casula Powerhouse in Sydney as part of Animation Playground). A darkened room is filled with fluorescent string in various outsize renditions of Maori string games (such as the globally popular "cat’s cradle"). With the help of UV black light, the gaudy colours leap at the eyes, making the shapes float in the ether, while on gauzy white sheets, moving projections of the same string games in three dimensions, are being eagerly manipulated by an endless stream of children (I didn’t actually get to try the interactive apparatus myself, such was the demand).

The control unit altering the data projection uses switches mounted on the fingers and palm of a black image of an open hand. The finger switches glow green, the palm switches are bright yellow and the black hands sit on bright pink disks, which look like lily pads and remind me of Christo’s wrapped islands. Though the hands are black rather than the showy white gloves of a magician, they still have me internally punning about putting the digit(al) back in prestidigitator. And indeed, there really is something magical about art that kids actually like. Besides which, Digital String Games II is simply very pretty and has me chuckling with its knowing appropriation of rave aesthetics; glow-in-the-dark colours and "sacred geometries" (read: string sculptures) have long been the favoured mood-setting devices of the Goa Trance scene.

Despite these "candy raver" associations (which I enjoyed, you can tell) there are deeper messages on display, about the way we think, communicate and remember. String games were used as mnemonic devices in orally-based Maori society. In other words, different shapes encapsulated whole myths (myths themselves being mnemonics for theories, beliefs, and codes of conduct). Like modern software, whole libraries of stories can be extracted out of apparently simple storage devices. With the interactive component of Digital String Games, participants get to influence, but not control, the outcome. For, as with myths, and software systems, there are always constraints to be dealt with, be it the law of the gods or the law of the code writers.

It’s with this almost god-like omniscience that the simple finger actions of the interactive participant in Digital String Games II are amplified, creating sounds and movements that are far larger than the initial impulse (and projected for all to see). Like Michelangelo’s representation of the Creation of Adam (which is the inspiration behind Fairclough’s next project, Genesis), this simple, dare I say ‘digital’ gesture, has enormous ramifications.

According to Lander, the string figurations she has chosen in Digital String Games represent myths of creation and destruction: polar opposites in a binary universe. Whether you call it order and chaos, good and evil, yin and yang, most cultures have a concept of the opposites which animate life throughout the universe. In fact, the immortal words of the Maori haka, "Ka mate ka mate ka ora ka ora" ("It is bad it is bad, it is good it is good") sound to me like a pretty apt encapsulation of binary code, or cosmic "switching". It’s this dizzying conflation of the ancient and fundamental with the newest of the new that makes Digital String Games II so exciting and so relevant, revivifying traditional culture while dignifying the new.

For more information see: www.jf.auckland.ac.nz