Sadie Plant : : Zeros + Ones
digital women + the new technoculture

Ada's method [...] was to weave daydreams into seemingly authentic calculations. (Doris Langley Moore, in Ada, Lady Lovelace, possibly the first computer programmer)

Reading around Zeros and Ones:

Sadie Plant, 'The Future Loom: Weaving Women and Cybernetics', Mike Featherstone and Roger Burrows, eds Cyberspace/Cyberbodies/Cyberpunk: Cultures of Technological Embodiment 45-64. Sage, 1995.

review by Laura Lee.

Alex Galloway, Sadie Plant in relation to cyberfeminism, article.

Sexing the Machine. Sadie Plant in conversation.

Breaking the Myths. Interview with Susan Geller Ettenheim in Cybergrrl.

Sadie Plant and Linda Dement, interview with Miss M, as Plant was writing Zeros and Ones

Connected Texts

Linda Dement, Cyberflesh Girlmonster, 1995.
"...Cyberflesh Girlmonster is a macabre comedy of monstrous femininity, of revenge, desire and violence...About 30 women donated body parts by scanning their chosen flesh and digitally recording sound. From these, conglomerate bodies were created, animated and made interactive..."
Sadly, I haven't yet been able to get hold of a copy of this extraordinary CDROM, a work that inspired Plant. But you can read about it in the interview with Miss M (details above) and on http://contactzones.cit.cornell.edu/artists/dement.html.

two works inspired by Zeros and Ones and 'Weaving Women' are:
Alicia Felberbaum, Holes Linings Threads. Felberbaum uses source material from the textile mills of Batley, in Yorkshire. A longer version of this, including work by other artists, is available on CDROM from me.
Helen Whitehead Web, Warp and Weft for a different take on the issues, and lots of useful links to other creative explorations of women and weaving.

Some ideas to think about:

• Imagine Zeros and Ones is an unfinished manuscript. Write the next chapter. (Taken from www.educ.sfu.ca/gentech/cyberfem.html).
• Write a footnote to any aspect of a course text.
• What is Zeros and Ones about? What are some of the key arguments? What do you make of them? Are Plants ideas liberating for women? Is that an inappropriate question?
• How is history presented in Zeros and Ones? Focussing on specific 'historical' examples in the book, consider alternative approaches.
• If you have read Donna Haraway's Manifesto think about the similarities and the differences between the perspectives offered by these two major texts.
• Think specifically about the new myths imagined by both Plant and Haraway, as well as those in He, She and It and The PowerBook and other feminist re-writings you have come across (try, for example, Thompson's Virtual Girl or Piercy's Woman on the Edge of Time). Are new myths useful for women? Which women? Why now? Could you have a bash at developing a myth of your own ...?