"[The mez interview] seems like something young artists should see and read...I'm having the experience over and over in school now, that "text" has become mathematics to many of our young people. They seem frightened and fairly negative toward it in general, and seem to be having trouble charting their path into the maelstrom...Mez's textuality seems so vital and alive and personal, it needs to be taught more...or shown around in different contexts."

- Lanny Quarles, WRYTING-L.

In the Twitter Stream
by By Linda Carroli

"Mez knows no bounds as she skims the confluence of virtuality, technology and textuality. This morning her status declares that she is "twitter streaming new theory". She sidesteps the monumentality of theory's usual vehicle (the essay) and delivers intermittent compressed moments of sumptuous thoughts in her (in)famous word-wrangling style. This is the first Facebook writing/word experiment I have seen that explores engaging theory in this personalised and self-reflexive way.

"One of this week’s readings is a very strange looking piece by a writer called “Mez”, which utilizes the language and typography of ‘code’ to make its point about the potential differences between online and print forms...Mez’s website contains some examples of her work and details of the language she calls _mezangelle_ and which contains elements of email code, HTML and other more sophisticated programming languages."

- From: HAM422 - A group blog on creative writing and new media

"A good example of creative misuse of Web 2.0 is this blog/poem by artist Mez...The artist has creatively used the snap link previewer, a new little gizmo that you can install free on your site (the company in return collects data on who links to what etc) to augment the poetry."

-bina-93

"I'll see the Neuromancer movie if and only if
][mez][ writes the screenplay."

-RUR on the William Gibson forums, Posted May 24, 2007 07:50 PM

"Mez (aka Mary-Anne Breeze) ties experimental language to avatar creation and collaborative networking to explore complex and often contested political and social themes. The originality of her approach with its rich integration of the various aspects of her praxis has repercussions beyond aesthetics....Mez's precursors in print fiction include Kathy Acker [among other works, Kathy Acker's Empire of the senseless] whose surreal and terrible prose seems to have been semantically dismantled by Mez's more technologically engaged praxis. Both stretch language and genre until only thin tendrils of reference to mainstream literature remain. These thin tendrils are even more nebulous in Mez's case, since she distributes her work, and indeed, shares "ownership" of her work, in ways that exist beyond the scope of the capitalist print fiction industry."

-Language rules by Geniwate

"I only consistently read 4 Aussie poets - Jack Tranter, mez breeze, Sam Byfield [for eg] and I qualify this group as some of the greatest poetry being written today... [Australia] to me [is] a land steeped in Literature, writing English – but the break-throughs have been only recent – mez breeze’s work, fx – here’s a poet who has taken the notion of ‘communication’ in poetry to its extreme – ...she is in the midst of creating poetry anew..."

-William Fairbrother in The Critical Poet

"On 4/16, Snap...introduce[s] a major upgrade to Snap Preview Anywhere that was inspired in no small part by Mez’s use of link previews to illustrate text, rather than using links to send people away." [peter angles, market director, snap.com]"

"As you can see, the code-snippet only shows previews to linked pages on other domains. So Mez created a quick-and-easy blog dis[ap]posable, put up a few technically very simple HTML pages on another server, and linked to them from her poem. Ta-da: instantly a new genre is born.....there's something about taking disposable, ready-made, super-easy bits and pieces and putting them together as Mez has done that's just really fascinating. Yes, you can do that. Very simply. And by putting the link preview thing to a purpose other than its intended purpose (as Duchamp did with his pissoir) Mez has me seeing it all anew." - Jill Walker on jill/txt

"Mez's ID.xorcism, written in her by now famous "mezangelle" language shows us one more time the possibility to use the Net as a non-linear reading tool and that coding can be artistically and culturally oriented, through its creative re-interpretation. _ID.Xorcism_ is a project that flows in front of us, and we have to run after it without the possibility to "own it", a rapid creative flux that goes beyond, "passes us", exactly when we try to stop it to understand it.....A seductive game made of many multiple cyborgs.
_ID.Xorcism_ is a playful experiment too. It's about the idea of identity as fixed, unique and unchanging, that is neutralized (Identity.eXorcism?) in many other possible ways of appearing more fluid and displaced, more sensuous, slippery and mirror of our time."

- Tatiana Bazzichelli, jury member of 2006 Site Specific Award.

"...during a period of time from approximately 1995 to 1997 interface as a concern was investigated in earnest, and in some cases brilliantly realized by a very few of the original net.artists (Bunting, JODI, MEZ, Lialina)...Mez is without doubt one of the most consistent, prolific, innovative artists working new media today. Mez's work with language has had a considerable effect on the language of many..."

-Ted Warnell, warnell.com

"....'mezangelle' is in a similar league as Perl Poetry. 90% of Perl poetry (and I systematically collected it since years, including the early pieces of Larry Wall and Sharon Hopkins) is non-executable pseudocode as well. There is, however, one difference: All Perl poetry I know is just as naive as the original hacker ASCII Art (with its kitsch hearts, bunnies etc. painted as ASCII). You can find all kinds of love poems and haikus in Perl, but nothing that is actually interesting as contemporary poetry.

So with her work, mez does for code poetry as jodi and Vuk Cosic have done for ASCII Art: Turning a great, but naively executed concept into something brilliant, paving the ground for a whole generation of digital artists."

-Florian Cramer lecturing @ the Goethe Institute Barcelona, May 2002.

"How often have you expectantly visited a so called "innovative, new media" website with its tags of "highly interactive and engaging content" only to find that its creator's idea of interactivity is to force-feed the user a new page of information every time they click a "next page" button? This is definitely not the case with Australian net artist (net.artist) Mez's recent venture into the realm of the hypertextual with her _][ad][Dressed in a Skin C.ode_, a captivating anthology of non-linear literary works distributed through email lists.

In the creation of texts and poetic forms, Mez utilises her unique "mezangelle" language which appropriates features of code and programming syntax then combines these with plays on symbols and language to alter or enhance meanings. Upon initial contact with "mezangelle," many viewers may find it unsettling due to its ambiguous punctuation, abstract grammar, syllabic dissection and the subsequent slowed reading speed. However, once whatever original discomfort is overcome, the ingenuity of the "mezangelle" language as a literary technique or device really starts to assert itself. It allows Mez to extend her work beyond the boundaries of more conventional literary mediums and coaxes the viewer to construct new meanings for themselves of what it is they're engaging with on screen.

The works (net.wurks) contained within _][ad][Dressed in a Skin C.ode_ can be viewed as either singular texts, or as enhanced (n.hanced) works which utilise JavaScript and Flash to extend the user's conceptualisations even further. Rollovers and segments of audio are also effectively implemented within these enhanced works, with the sound samples used having at times a grating, yet organic quality about them which can be quite unnerving.

Originally, the navigation and interface design of _][ad][Dressed in a Skin C.ode_ may be fairly confusing and unorthodox (particularly the difficult to read fonts and the directory of enhanced texts, with its arrays of what appear to be linked buttons), until it is realised that Mez has not set out to create a site that conforms to usability guidelines and commercially driven ideologies. This is a site that allows the user parallel or simultaneous understandings of the content, while instigating "non-linear and imaginative order" into the vocabulary of electronic communication.

Mez's _][ad][Dressed in a Skin C.ode_ is an excellent example of the notion of web "spaces" as opposed to web pages and through the use of the "mezangelle" language system and syntax, it is a highly thought-provoking and stimulating collection of textual works. Intended to expand and extract upon a user's perceptions and conceptualisations, these works will leave you feeling somewhat enlightened and enriched by their required level of comprehension and engagement."

- Scott Esdaile, fine Arts forum.

"An honorary mention goes to "Re (ad.htm" by the Australian artist mez, This entry created a lot of discussion in the jury, and quite dissimilar individual rankings and opinions. "Re(ad.htm" consists of a selection of writings or, to use the artist's terminology, "wurks" that had been posted to several net cultural and arts-related mailing lists. They are highly condensed pieces written in "mezangelle", an invented hybrid language which mixes syntactical snippets of programming languages, network protocols and markup code with the English language. The resulting texts can be read in multiple, often contradictory ways due to their elaborate use of ambiguity and compound ('portmanteau') words noted in rectangular brackets, thus resembling regular and Boolean expressions in commandline programs and programming languages.

In contrast to a merely ornamental code chic, this hybrid language is used to expose and deconstruct the epistemological politics engendered into seemingly "neutral", technical codes. It is poetically dense, involving and difficult, but also humorous. Of course, it is not technically executable code, although the bracketed expressions expand into multiple combinatory output sequences. But above all the mezangelle targets fictitious, fantastic compilers, creating a dream-like imagination of metonymic contiguity between human bodies and machines. Sure, this topic has been spelled out in popular culture and media theory multiple times, but mez succeeds to free it from all cyber-kitsch by tackling it from within, in structure."

- jury for the read_me 1.2 software art award.

"...jodi's work is good _because_ jodi have the code under control, just as mez is an _author_, machine-aided, style-enhanced...just as antiorp/nn [is] the most collaborative entity in the series....they exhibit a clear sense of ideological tightness and closure."

- Andreas Broeckmann

"Mez's latest, _][ad][Dressed in a Skin C.ode_, at times seems to propose that the decay of a system (sometimes the system is the guts of computer memory; at times it is perception itself, reduced to strangely harmonic rollovers; sometimes, yes, it is language) is also its life, the vibrant force that breathes step into its inertia....

Never have I seen such a profound use of the rollover effect as I have seen in her works. In Maschine F][w][orked N.tentions vs Haggard Critical Mass, a wonderful specimen of Mez's current mengerie of rhizomatic soma, the user faces a powder-blue typographic painting. Roving across its serene glow with the mouse, the user soon discovers that this seemingly static work (an email header, actually, from Mez addressed to the Webartery and the Wryting lists) is porous; one's rove becomes along its surface a white hand, which means COME IN. The painting-header swings between the stationary rigidity of painting and sound (a jungle; some jungle deep within the piece is choking in vines; distorted animals crawl through its undergrowth)........

Mez is primarily a writer, but a writer with a clear idea of the very core of interactive media--this work is a whole; it is not simply text transfigured with pretty pictures, be they moving to sound or no. Mez sculpts in these new media. She constructs a hypertext much like Joyce must have constructed Finnegan's Wake. There are, in her language, certain resonances that carry themselves from the bounds of the page into the quickness of motion and the ambiance of noise."

-Lewis Lacook, Rot and Root.

"A future art...would definitely be an art of code. Already today within the field of so-called “net art” we can see attempts which point in this direction. The “codeworks” (to borrow a term by Alan Sondheim) by Netochka Nezvanova (or: NN, integer, antiorp), mez, Jodi and others focus their/our attention on the “raw” program code which our increasingly digitized working and living environment is based upon. As in the future...it is important to realize that it’s not the glossy surfaces but rather the underlying program code which has performative properties. One could assume the existence of two texts, a “phenotext” and a “genotext”, when talking about the properties of graphical interfaces. The surface effects of the phenotext, i.e. moving texts, are generated and controlled by other underlying “effective” texts, programming codes or source texts..."

-Inke Arns, Berlin, in _An Art Yet Unknown: Art Will Be Code, Or It Will Not Be_ written for the Anthology of Art [Jochen Gerz] and organized by the School of Visual Arts of Braunschweig (Germany) and the University of Rennes (France)

"Mez (is) a prolific multimedia poet and net artist...“Net.wurker” is her own term. She writes in a cryptic-but-decodable, fissured, Joycean-cummings and rhizomic language dubbed “mezangelle”, forcing the reader to puzzle out and open up possibilities even before any technical interactivity/multimodality a la Flash kicks in....Java Museum is showcasing a cross-section of her work 1995-2002. The scope and depth, the reflexive prescient analysis, and the sheer intricate, exquisite, evocative, enigmatic verbal nanotech—extraordinary. Explore it....Check out her new work, Monitored [from ][ad][Dressed in a Skin C.ode]. It’s a kind of condensed manifesto: the corporeal in (not just versus) the machinic, the visceral emotion phrased in coded calligrams, the vividly-dramatic underneath the fixed text. It consists of crossword-Scrabbled diagrams using individual keyboard letters, which on rollover unfold into poetry, soldered on circuit/chip schematics in glorious Mondrian colours. The word-total’s tiny but the rabbit-hat trick with interpretations and proliferating readings is amazing, clued in by the sonogram/ultrasound pulse and the expanded-title “S][ervo]all Monito.red][heart] [Beats”.

The essay is the antonym of mezangelle."

-Dean Kiley, Realtime, Issue 47

"In her brilliant analysis of MEZ’s “code-wurk,” Rita Raley demonstrates that the reading process is significantly altered with a mezangelled text, for the decoding that normally constitutes literary reading is here disrupted by visual signs that have no phonemic equivalent, for example the “][“ symbol or a word like “libr][bin][ary.” This is a language that cannot be spoken in all its fullness. The historic evolution of a system of marks tied to oral articulation is disrupted and re-encoded as a system of mixed phonemes and code symbols that can be read and apprehended but not spoken. Thus “la langue” of Saussure and the generations of semioticians following him is displaced by a language system that can be fully understood only by a bilingual reader who knows both English and code.

Spoken language cannot be the desired object of study, as it was for Saussure, who saw written language as derivative and secondary. It is not oral articulations but inscriptions that are central in this language system, and moreover inscriptions that go deep into the machine. As the code symbols continually remind us, the screen text is only the topmost part of the language system; underlying the screen text are layers and layers of coding languages essential for producing the surface text. To read mezangelle is to experience a world in which language is inextricably in-mixed with code and code with language, creating a creolized discourse in which the human subject is constituted through and by intelligent machines."

- N. Katherine Hayles, "Deeper into the Machine: The Future of Electronic Literature".

"Mez's mezangelle language, conceived in cyberspace, is now being noticed globally - even the traditional print based poetry community is becoming aware of mezangelle as a new literary device, and if not new, certainly an extension of the last big phenomenon of poetry, parataxis within lines of poetry as characterised by the work of the language poets in the 1970s and 1980s and which now permeates to mainstream poetry.

As such it is difficult to read. I resisted for many months, hitting the delete button each time I'd see a mez post....but I allowed myself the space to receive this text, purely by her persistence, wondering if i'd hit the delete button one too many times, and I found my way in to her work.

Equally important as the mezangelle language has been the method of collection of the texts, the method of generation of the texts, and the collaborative aspect of the work. This is inseparable from the work itself, and totally exposed out there, poetry in the act of being made - the process becomes equally as important as the product."

-komninos zervos, Lecturer in poetry and cyber studies, Griffith University.

"...Without addressing these issues directly through a who-dun-it plot, Mez redeems the Internet which is one of the hottest topics in the society of today. Her 'mezangelle' language installs a non-linear and imaginative order into the seemingly pointless gibberish of e-mail communication.

In the beginning of the navigation through the Datableeding texts , Mez playfully takes a symbolic blood sample from the viewer, who is invited to confide in her and write down his/her childhood nickname. With the viewer's nickname becoming part the verses on the following page, he/she is initiated into the communication process as an act of creating culture. The syncopated recital of enchanting verses written in this personalized synthetic 'mezangelle' language combines pieces of collective and anonymous e-mail chatting.

Mez composes the texts by inter-penetration of different layers of writing, codes and signs which have become the vernacular of communication through e-mails. The language is enticing and onomatopoeic. Its refreshing quality recalls the ways in which a child learns to speak, freely making up names for the things she observes, and making sense of the universe or simply repeating in peculiar ways what others have said. The artist breaks the stereotypical categorizations of Internet communication by placing the viewer in the position of the child who is learning a new language. Another aspect of the strangeness of the ingenious 'mezangelle' is that it makes us think twice when we say that English is the language of the Internet because the Datableeding texts project suggests that the wide use of English on the Net is transforming the language and the innovations are rapidly spreading off-line.

No longer obeying the rules of grammar, linear language in this project goes out of control and splinters into words and codes governed by a new syntax. The use of the Internet is a practice which engenders idiomatic expressions of its own. In the extensively popular analogy between the Web and the human blood system the texts are seething with life and the pixels are 'stirred,' infused with energy circulating in a flow just as blood cells. The grand finale of cloning angels, the mythological messengers inhabiting the ether, reverberates over the texts as echoes of angelic voices. The artist 'channels' the 'blood' stream of the Datableeding texts , gently carrying the viewer from the Net codes toward the codes of the next so-called revolution: that of genetic engineering."

- Rossitza Daskalova, CIAC Magazine 13th edition, _Language transformed by the machine_.

"There are several pieces where text, sound, movement and interactivity all seek to support one another in a complex lyrical or narrative whole.....an example of an enhanced package [is] from _][ad][Dressed in a Skin C.ode_ by Mary-Anne Breeze [alias mez], with its invented mezangelle system [which shows] her enthusiasm for elaborate punning and inventive programming...."

-Robert Coover's keynote address at ELO's State of the Arts Symposium 2002.

"mez's writings are, in my view, examples of reflecting the virulence of digital text without actually coding in programming language. - The beauty of 'mezangelle' is that it uses elements of programming language syntax as material, i.e. reflecting formal programming language without being one. Of course, many other aesthetic options in Internet poetry exist, and many of them may have an aesthetics which totally separates the textuality of the digital poem from the internal textuality of the machine. I just prefer if the latter is the product of an aesthetically conscious decision _against_ algorithmic coding (i.e. as its negative reflection)."
+
"If it doesn't (conceptually, aesthetically) matter at all for a work whether it resides on the CD-ROM or in the Internet, then I have difficulties calling it "net literature". The fact that something displays in a browser isn't enough to make it, to quote mez, a "net wurk". You might consider it picky, but in my view "net literature" and "digital literature" aren't synonymous per se,
although they frequently intersect today. I could, for example, think of a lot of analog "net literature", like Mail Art or even 18th century letter novels, or Japanese renshi poetry."
+
"The code poetry of, among others, mez, Alan Sondheim and Ted Warnell seems to build on two developments a) the re-coding of traditional pictorial ASCII art into amimetical noise signals by net artists like Jodi, antiorp, mi-ga and Frederic Madre, (b) the mass proliferation of programming language syntax through web and multimedia scripting languages and search engines. For the reader of mez's "netwurks", it remains all the more an open question whether the "mezangelle" para-code of parentheses and wildcard characters only mimics programming languages or is, at least partially, the product of programmed text filtering."[in cream 1: Collaborative Research into Electronic Art Memes]

-Florian Cramer, lecturer in Comparative Literature at Freie Universität Berlin.

“While conventional levels of discourse on the net range from turgid technobabble to vapid self-promotion, the messages from Netochka Nezvanova (aka Integer, Antiorp, Netochka Nezvanova, =cw4t7abs, Fifo http://www.eusocial.com/ or Mez (aka Netwurker, Mary Anne Breeze, http://www.hotkey.net.au/~netwurker/) come down the wire vibrating, resonating with a particular kind of life, displaying a recognizable yearning and an empathetic warmth, creating a new paradigm of ‘net communication: phrases that disrupt, sometimes gently, empathetically sensual, sometimes violently, abrasively. Both artists extend an invitation, a portal through their texts into a feminine and radical subjectivity, but it does not come free…

…To enter into the work of either of these two writers, one has to embrace the structure, quite different in each of their cases, used to frame their perceptions…

Mez's work is "mezangelled", carefully broken into word fragments according to an alchemical formula that spawn their own relationships within multiple syllables…

…The sentences expand within and outside the parentheses as the author responds internally to the words. The result is a syncopated reading of the text, which opens up meanings for the eye and mind to coordinate. The overall result is a reconstruction of how mez negotiates an experience, kinesthetically, emotionally, and aurally. It unfolds in time and with the viewer's participation, an internal ululation…

…The words move under your eye and expand once one accepts their gentle invitation, then contract again. The meanings ripen into a softness and then, when the effort is expended, contract into a more conventional hardness; there blooms in the reader a desire to keep them in their expanded fecund form. After a time, swimming into mez texts is a soft adventure into a rhythmic unfolding and retraction of the meaning/text. While one maintains the meditative state, it is an entry into a graced soft potentiality. Repeating this exercise with mezangelled texts gives the impression of mez's texts blooming over and over, an organic opening and closing, with similarities to organic softness and corpuscular hardness - revealing in this cycle its organic nature, like breathing. This process involves the reader in an active way, as the subject matter is frequently gleaned from mail lists. Mez records her responses in mezangelled text, and serves as an emotional and poetic reflector of on-line life.

...The wired world of the net combines these two descriptions, emotional dependency and physical action, and achieves its apotheosis in the stimulatory connections of the net, where a community of netizens respond and react within seconds of broadcast. As the texts described here show, this responsiveness encompasses the spectrum of emotional and intellectual life. It is a rich environment, though it is composed primarily of words streaming across screens, and it has produced its own heroines, desperados, and geniuses. Netochka Nezvanova and Mez are two geniuses of these netizen realms, producing the ‘net lit and documenting the ‘net life in its own terms.”

-Beatrice Beaubien, _mez|||net|!|zen – Net Fr!sson_ in _Codework_ [American Book Review, Sept/Oct 2001]

“……the important thing is maybe not pictures and programs, but rather the ideas behind them. The Electrohype exhibition of digital works, in the galleries and at the Web, featured international pioneers like Vuk Cosic, Alexei Shulgin, Olia Lialina, Mez and others…see the website at www.electrohype.org .”

-Fred Andersson reviewing the international conference and exhibition Electrohype 2000 at the University College of Malmo, Sweden, 25-29 October 2000, in:
Leonardo Digital Reviews

"The Australian codeworker Mez has developed a distinctive prose style that she calls mezangelle…Rather than link discrete blocs of text, or “lexias”, to each other, Mez introduces the hypertext principle of multiplicity into the word itself. Rather than produce alternative trajectories through the text on the hypertext principle of “choice,” here they co-exist within the same textual space.

The interest of Mez’s writings is not limited to this distinctive approach to the text. While the words split and merge on the screen, the authoring “avatar” behind them is also in a state of flux. Texts issue, in various forms in various places, from data[h!bleeder, Phonet][r][ix, netwurker, and many other heteronyms…At the heart of the codeworking enterprise is a call for a revised approach to language itself."

-McKenzie Wark in _Codework_ [American Book Review, Sept/Oct 2001]

"How can anyone be critical of Mez?...Not only is her output prolific and her product cutting (edge) but she also demonstrates a highly specialised knowledge and mastery of the technical capabilities of computer software in realising creative projects, and is a genuinely active and present participant in online writing communities."

-Mark Stephens reviewing the trace/incubation conference on page 6 of anat newsletter 42 (sept/nov00).

"...Mez reaches into the very structure of the word, creating an entire para-language, called "m[ez]ang.elle," which is readable by readers of English, but only at the cost of a dramatically slowed reading speed. She organizes textual performances which she designates as e-mail trawling, hacker attacking, open source kode poetri, or electronic channeling. Though this work uses many of the devices of so-called L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry, fluid spacing, bracketing, and ambiguous punctuation to obtain a simultaneity of reference that tests fixed neuronal patterns, it also tests these, simultaneously, through choreographed and random kinetic oscillations of the Web environment, re-converting the process of reading to a process of action, perhaps somewhat akin to what oral cultures undertook when print first spread through them."

- Stephanie Strickland, from "Dali Clocks: TIME DIMENSIONS OF HYPERMEDIA", at Digital Arts and Culture Conference, Norway 00.

"The mysterious Mez is a netizen who, rumor has it, lives in Wollongong Australia, but whose presence is felt world wide via her e-mails to various web art and culture lists, and her remixes of these e-mails (along with additional text) into literary works in web form. Mez's style, which makes liberal use of square brackets and other punctuation to divide words at their linguistic joints and offer multiple possible recombinations, is more than just superficial strangeness. Her years of practice at the keyboard (I have read her chat that she averages something like six hours a day in e-mail and other networked writing) have developed her into a deeply skilled stylist with a unique and intelligent relationship to written language......

Mez's writing rips out of the screen from the first instant and never looks back. It is a refreshing reminder that we are free to forego the tired preambles and summaries and careful tropes and conventional scaffolding of writing and plunge right into the beautiful, awful heart of language --- the way we do in our most intimate e-mails and most secret journals. Mez's writing earns the highest accolade from other writers --- imitation. Mez's style (she calls it Mezangelle) is infectious, and it would be no surprise to see it attract other practitioners, in the same way that music styles (Reggae, Techno) gather adherents and become movements."

- Rob Wittig's curatorial statement in START HERE> An exhibition of electronic literature curated by 7 Chicago electronic writers and digital artists for the Version>02 Festival at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago.

"[on the Mezangelle Language system]...I don't want to explain it, can't explain it. I do want to experience it, reflect on it, and re-experience it. All the while enjoying it immensely. Some of the finest net art being done today."

-Dirk Hine {Digital Art & Design}in Subterranean Notes

" 'Sky Scratchez' is a collaboration between Mez and myself...

The writing (as in words) is almost exclusive Mez's. (with the exception of
a few pop-up segments of my own, which are commentary [of a sort] on Mez's writing... )

The functionality and the design of the piece is almost exclusively mine, though heavily inspired by my reading of Mez's 'sky scratchez' words."

-Talan Memmott, Beehive

"In the self-critical work The Art of M[ez]ang.elle.ing, Australian artist/writer Mez describes her process as one in which technique becomes theory. And, in turn Mez's theory itself becomes the technique for a sort of serial becoming.

'...technique b-came theory;
fiction fact N the dis.tinct[ure]ion e-rrelevant. emailing turned fromme fictionalstruc.t[o]ur.ez 2 cracking otherz wurdz, re-alignin them, reversin, refemmeing in2 a medical/sci-fi mash; mixing theor[.M.z]ee in2 postfiction, faction]... '

Brackets and alternative spellings interrupt the transmission as the process overcodes and reveals polysemic potentialities within the primary message. The polysemic values are generally nested within "[]" brackets with the primary message resting on the outside. The primary and additive values are both prone to alteration - alphabetic characters are replaced with numerals, "and" becomes "N", and in what could be a subtle reference to Barthes - "S" is sometimes replaced with "Z". The effect is a tightly woven text(ile) with warp and woof marked by differences between the primary and bracketed transmissions. Within and without the "[]", the text(ile) is punctuated with stray threads of neologistic play.

Mez's essay and method indicates an awareness of the hyper-status of inscription and document as they apply to the Internet. Not only are lines between fact and fiction blurred here - identity is introduced into indeterminacy, turned into a condition of writing. It is important to note that the author has chosen to write this critical observation of technique using the creative method that is the subject of its critique. In fact most of Mez's online writing production whether it be creative, critical or correspondence is written in this style. To a certain extent, this reinforces the 'tweening' notion of the thesis -blurring, stirring the critical with the creative - veiling identity with a baroque syntactic style...

...The appropriation of email correspondence is fairly common in what is being discussed here as 'codework.' The use of email lists for the source and distribution of some of the work places the Author at a fulcrum, as processor or mediator between dispersals across the apparatus - playing a game of hot potato with digital information. This form of conductivity, rather than the polysemic intentions of the text, is what locates the work as electronic. Certainly, the work is encoded, but the Author originated process produces a pseudocode rather than one that is directly related to the Internet apparatus. We are not confronted with serrations of HTML or JavaScript, but with the results of a subjective parsing that extends context, while jamming and complicating the primary transmission. The text undermines its own authority by leaving the reader pleasantly undecided whether it is inscription or encryption they are faced with."

-Talan Memmott in E_RUPTURE://Codework -Serration in Electronic Literature, _Codework_ [American Book Review, Sept/Oct 2001]

"When I first encountered mez's work the association with contemporary clichés of language didn't even occur to me for quite some time - i saw it as something else completely. the difference: CONTENT/intent. mez doesn't play this way with language because of trendi-ness or eaze, but with deliberate intent/choice. [this] FORM as integral to her content, and as [a] form of communication which is distinguished by her particular content/treatment/meaning ... also, it doesn't read with the eaze that phonetic treatment of language usually duz - in youth filled chat rooms for instance - one has to dig a bit, step back and read with conscious intent/concentration if one's is to actually gather what's being said, which brings a new attention to reading, akin to that which we bring to Shakespeare, etc."

-Claire Dinsmore, Cauldron & The Net

"...mez's net.art [is] deliberately designed to incite people and then she posts responses examining those who responded...she also puts them under erasure by doing it in the way she does: as if it is a computer programmed to give you an analysis and score based on an algorhythmic formulae...you should take the time to read mez's web site. do a search at www.metacrawler.com for your email address you'll find the first exchange posted on the archives for another list in there if you want to read it again. i think it's www.7-11.org."

-Kelley Walker, Pulp-Culture

"...Mary-Anne Breeze, better known on line as 'Mez', [is] an Australian artist who sends poetic collections of thoughts to lists, whereby she plays with the different layers of lists and platforms on the net. Her work seemed most difficult to present well in an art space, which made me curious for any ideas about this from herself. Mez has developed her own language, which takes a bit of time to read and understand….As an example of how she writes I show you what she answered to my question whether an exhibition changes the nature of her work:

"due 2 the open source nature of my ][net][wurk][s][ - ie the writing packets that i circulate via email and various other communication technologies ][eg IRC or MOOs][ - make it easy 2 n.tegrate in2 an overall _complete_ wurk that can find itself blinking away on a cursored screen in a white-cubesque room ][gallery][. obviously, i'd prefer 2 let the net itself support the wurk N allow its sporadic growth, rather than having 2 digress in2 these established methods of x.posure N presentation ][ie in a traditional real-time gallery]. howeva, when i choose 2 x.tend these net.wurk tendrils b-yond the mezangelled text, 4 woteva reasons, this multifaceted work re][construction][wiring does add complex facets N lurvely f.fects that may prove 2 shift the piece in2 somewhere other....whether that's a loaded _other_ or not i'm not the 1 2 type....."

("Due to the open source nature of my net-works (ie the writing packets that I circulate via email and various other communication technologies (eg IRC or MOOs) it is easy to integrate them into an overall complete work that can find itself blinking away on a cursored screen in a white cubesque room or gallery. Obviously I'd prefer to let the net itself support the work and allow its sporadic growth, rather than having to digress into these established methods of exposure and presentation (ie a traditional real-time gallery). However, when I choose to extend these network tendrils beyond the 'mezangelled' text, for whatever reasons, this multifacetted work reconstruction wiring does add complex facets and lovely effects that may prove to shift the piece into somewhere other... whether that is a loaded other or not I am not the one to say.")

She further states that she prefers to give the work to a curator and say 'do what you want with it', as 'networks are difficult to control anyway'. So Mez, like many other net artists (and also other artists before them), is not used to having control over her work. This aspect of net art could very well be the reason we have seen so many net artists go along with rather bland or, from the perspective of their work, unexpected exhibition situations. There is not just the technological barrier, but also a psychological difficulty to deal with a physical space that is so far from the net artists' first environment. The first environment of course being the one in which the artist more or less controls the presentation of her or his work, and in which the artist is very close to her or his audience.”

-Josephine Bosma, 'How To Exhibit Net Art' presented @ the Staatliche Akademie der Bildenden Künste, Stuttgart, May 2001.

"Mary-Anne [mez] Breeze's 'Clone Alpha' will resonate with all...[she] presents us with countless images of the same blonde which, at a click of a mouse, turn into abstract, monochromatic images as found in cheap kaleidoscopes. Aldous Huxley's classification of humans in his novel 'Brave New World' comes to mind."

-Daniella Walsh [reprinted from Encore, Fine Arts, The Register].

" Ohne Trostpreis dagegen bleibt jenes Werk, das in der Perspektive mancher Theoretiker am ehesten den Preis verdient hätte, weil es seine Sprache an Computerprogrammiersprachen geschult hat, wie Florian Cramer im Hinblick auf Mary Anne Breeze (MEZ) festhält ("sub merge {my $enses; ASCII Art, Rekursion, Lyrik in Programmiersprachen", in: Text & Kritik, Themenheft Digitale Literatur hg. v. H. L. Arnold und R. Simanowski, H 152, Oktober 2001).
Bei MEZ mag schon der Titel - "_the data] [h!] [bleeding texts_" - Angst verbreiten, und in der Tat wird, wer von ASCII Art und Programmiercodes nichts weiß, die mehrdeutige Wortverschachtelung in Mary Anne Breezes Kunstsprache ,,mezangelle" kaum verstehen und geniessen können. Ein mit Programmierung vertrauterer Juror als McCaffery hätte vielleicht "_the data] [h!] [bleeding texts_" den Preis zuerkannt."

-Roberto Simanowski, dichtung-digital

"Underneath good confusion is much reward. I like the idea of mez trying to cram multiple narratives into multiple dimensions, trying to tell two stories at once. Much in the same way a good novelist will offer the reader the ability to explore moral depth...I think this kind of work...opens up lots of questions...in terms of what it means to perceive, and the effects sensory-expansion could have on our consciousness. By conveying more image in a new style of syntax, you convey more information. As our minds learn to read in this multi-channeled format, we use more of our brains. More becomes possible."
-Sean Tubbs

"Is it possible to define parameters, to navigate precise coordinates for exactly what mez's hypertextual layering 'means' any more than what Finnegans Wake 'means'? Of course not.....the intertextualities are themselves the body, they are not representations of some transcendent order beyond themselves, they are just, gloriously, themselves, live. incarnation: Nabokov's Ada and Van are their own texts. Here's where the intertextuality of the net both thwarts and enriches epistemology. It's not that we can engineer a kind of knowing like scientific 'truth' via the technologies of the net. The kinds of knowing, or epistemologic, constructs capable of flourishing in this simultaneous noplace-land are creations of our own play. Thus to me the technobody of a netart work is a delicious double memory package, it is the me of MEZ: "me" goes to "z" (z=ultimate alphabet)."



-Christina McPhee, Moderator of Empyre Mailing List

"When I read Mez's work, I sometimes think of Masaccio's Expulsion from the Garden of Eden with Adam covering his eyes and Eve her breasts and mons. I begin to hear Carmina Burana--snatches of the sacred and profane. Various tensions are set up between the body and technology, beauty and pain. Sometimes they are affiliations, sometimes skirmishes.

At one point in Greenaway's _Prospero's Books_ the camera moves down a long hallway, filming various scenes. So I can see what [mez] means by architectural....I feel I'm whizzing by images, signs, scenes in space."


-Christy Sheffield Sanford
CWWG-colloquium

_Interviewed by Josephine Bosma for Rhizome_

Mary-anne Breeze, better known as Mez, lives and works in Australia. She first got into a larger net.art picture in 1997, via the net.artmailinglist 7-11. Her work is highly 'textual', but expands to for instance sound as well. Considering the relationship between concretepoetry and music or sound, this probably should come as no surprise. She likes to change her name (mz post modemism, mezchine, ms Tech.no.whore, flesque, e-mauler, and mezflesque.exe) and maybebecause of this, plus the nature of her work, she has a less clearly demarcated position then some other net.artists. This relative 'instability', compared to some highly compact web artworks is one of the attractive sides of her work for me.

*

JB: How would you describe the kind of net art you make?

Mez: Hard question this one, basically because of the immediate temptation to launch into my trademark writing style/language; that is to 'mezangelle'. This style of writing/textual construction [that has at its base email dialogues and network exchanges] underpins all my net.artwork, even the more image intensive versions.The format evolved from a series of emailed collaborative pieces carried out with m@ on the 7-11 mailing list from '96 onwards. At the time, I was into switching avatarian cloaks [the most regular being 'ms post modemism'] which is another defining criteria of my net.artwork. My particular 'angle'was to take the information text tracts m@ would post and 'mangle' them through free/multi-word associative techniques and repost them- hence the term, mezangelle. This technique has developed since, with computer code conventions and regular chat/email iconographscontributing to its formulation.


[read the remainder of the e-nterview here].

"...the idea of difference and fragmentation is celebrated as enriched proliferation in the transformative hypertextual writing of _the data][h!][bleeding texts_. It would be a nonsense to attribute an author to this work, as the concept of the author, with its connotations of origin and presence, don’t sit well with the discontinuous poetics of Mez (a.k.a Mary-Anne Breeze, another shape-changer). Mez’s e-deographic writing literalizes the dispersive nature of the network, elongating and dismembering language into an unreadable, unrecognizable syntax that is, surprisingly, rich and full of meaning. It is replete with puns, double entendres, indeterminate meanings and unexpected dislocations. Words are broken up into syllables, then broken down even further to particles. Mez’s writing fuses the idea of the hypertextual with the abstraction of code, signaled in the prolific use of diacritic marks, such as brackets, apostrophes and underscores. The ungraspable, elusive quality of electronic writing achieves its most dramatic form in the exasperating dysrhythmia of e.Motion.all. Weapon..Load.er. In this frenetic work, we are confronted with a concussive experience of an interface that, like Proteus, literally eludes any attempt to be pinned down and interacted with. We have become so accustomed to point and click at things we are interacting with in the space of the screen. This work knows this and refuses to co-operate in any way."



-Darren Tofts, _Wrestling with Proteus: Net Art, the Antipodes and Beyond_, the New Wave Festival Catalogue at The Brooklyn Academy of Music.

" Mez's _the data][h!][bleeding texts_ like the work of da Rimini and geniwaite are concerned with the force of surplus information that can counter the process by which the escalating neural density of the net situates the end user into increasingly fixed respondent positions...

_the data][h!][bleeding texts_ are embedded in cyborgian suspicion and complicity. Failed code is used to highlight the communicative rupture inherent in all coded sequence, to throw monkey wenches and cream pies at semiotic technology, to reveal code as error. The title _the data][h!][bleeding texts_ somaticizes information, which is to draw information back into its material origins, its primordial conditions of material fallibility in order to focus on errors that can deliberately unfold the structure of the code. Mez thus presents a theology of digital creation where coding error is sacralized as the origins of all code; an origin that negates all utopian intention bound up with digital technology. We recognize how any code can fail or be violated. Thus we recognize its boundaries the limits of encoding which points to a semantic territory beyond the code that can lead to counter-meanings and pre-coded meanings. To speak of uncoded meaning is to point out the disjuncture between interpretive closure-- that satisfaction of reading and comprehension that any code provides-- and the experiential. Thus data bleeds from an inside to an outside; from code to non-code.

_the data][h!][bleeding texts_ are concerned with damaged and fragmented bodies, bodies deafened, drowned and wounded by information. But the digitized body is one without organs, without body parts. Sensory organs that endowed the body with agency have been seconded to the machinery of data production. We may ask from where does the data bleed, from what wound and who can lay claim to this trauma? For the images Mez presents are ultimately wounds in search of a whole body from whence they came. For Mez the ressemblage of the wounds, the rearrangement of the code is the only possible response to automated image proliferations, the only way to salvage the experiential body from the structure of information."

Allen Feldman, The Digital Miniature: Private Perceptions in a Public Space.

"Regular readers of fAf will be familiar with the work of Mez. aka Mary-Anne Breeze (amongst dozens of other pseudonyms). Those who have not yet heard of this Australian-based artist will have the opportunity of exploring her polysemic language system mezangelle, in The Data][h!][bleeding T.ex[e]ts_. Mez is one of the web's artistic innovators, garnering high praise from a wide variety of reviewers for her mastery of incorporating javascript into her writing and opening fork after fork in the reader's imagination."

-Benjamin Spooner, _Touring MAAP2001_ in fine Arts forum.

"Model Citizens: Their Urban Strechnology Kit and info-mercials illustrate broader issues of d.i.y activism, access, personhood, and the changing climate towards technology and identity......Using the devices found in computer languages and applying them meaningfully to natural language, Mez [Mary Anne Breeze] employs a polysemic use of language in net-based textual works that highlight the potentialities of language play and identity swapping in communicating alternative meanings and responding to world events."

-From the _ Indepth Arts News_ review of "MODEL CITIZENS and MY SUN" 04-10-2001 until 27-10-2001 ArtSpace Woolloomooloo, Sydney, Australia.

"][mez's][ BAM portfolio is exemplarily. Architectonically, it's quite cathedral,--- yet without expectable rectilinearities per se. A very free and leisurely sense of progress through the byways...I knew sometimes that I was getting further and further from the source ("home"), but didn't feel anxious about that leavetaking,... despite how minimally emphasized navigation sometimes was."

-Jeffrey Jullich

"The work of Mez net_wurker or Mary Anne Breeze, also displays a kind of syllable and letter parataxis. Developed on the Web, in discussion groups via e-mail, and using Flash animation to insert syllables into words, between words, moving in and out of words, Mez's mezangelle poetic language translates well onto paper. Mez's parenthetic splitting of words, changes the way you first read the word when you rescan it and make a new combination of syllables within the one word. It's a parataxis of letters and syllables within words.

In this poem by Mez, distributed via email discussion lists (WebArtery), one gets a feeling of computer HTML code, which seems to characterize Mez's style, but it is the breaking up of words with parentheses into letters and syllables that makes for interesting recombinations. It is a poem about a woman, the use of the deliberately gendered expression tells us that. Whether it is the author's head or the subject's head that is full we don't know, but maybe both. The next line is a mix of ritualistic and red lipstick, there is a conflict here and it is a women's conflict. The language is sourced in youth and vitriol, ego-blasting, e-blasting via the web, gob-blasting, mouthing discontents. There is grandstanding and attention seeking, and strutting of ego or egos. The battle continues, involving others, debate is heated. c.rowd[y] of warring codes, angels become demons, the man-eating shark becomes the man, eating shark. The headhuntress is named and ascends the throne, to be attacked, she cracks, and so does her support. The sanity of the subject is questioned, the damage done by remaining silent, the ritual of censorship/the rite of incensed worship is a brilliant mezangelle line. And are the black and white obscenities, words on a screen or on a page? The next line is also quite brilliant, the authoritarian nature of the command beginning with u. must is reinforced by the inclusion of [& dad voice]. This stanza speaks of one way compromise, of subjection to the authority, of restoring the status quo. The last stanza the action of interrogation/the act of interception, continues the argument in cyberspace, murder me through atoms, [www]walls, and the last line I read as moderator status, hiatus, versus you always.


Mez's parataxis of syllable and letter, within words themselves, sets up a poetic experience where the words clash within themselves, their internal workings in opposition, disrupting the way we read as language and forcing a closer examination of the text, creating new meanings with the text. Encountered on e-mail discussion lists, the text as such is difficult to read and requires the creation of a space to receive this text. Many listees reject the challenge, and label it spam without having engaged in its language or followed its development from post to post. But those who embrace it become active and enthusiastic practitioners."

-komninos zervos in "The new forms and devices of poetry in cyberspace." The North American Centre for Interdisciplinary Poetics.

"The allegorical figuration of the traumatic irruption of the Real seems to lie at the heart of Mez's recent work, " >di][e][lation manifesto-:-a sliver of the future f][br][eeder< ." Here the mouse click serves to destabilize the interactor. First of all, the question is where to click? Web navigation usually proceeds from the interactor's recognition of a significant "button," a visual element promising to function as a hyperlink and as such to fulfill the interactor's freedom in interactivity. But the visual clues, made up either of garbled word chunks or opaque code-like punctuation series, are barely clues at all. Once the interactor does click on the right buttons, however, popup windows appear. And here is where the traumatic irruption of History seems to be figured: what we get when we click on a button is either a scrollable mini-window containing more disjointed text OR a popup window containing a Flash movie, each one featuring some new alien creature who comes closer and closer to our faces, all the while giving off or being accompanied by some disturbing sound that somehow resembles the sounds of breathing or of a bodily pulse. "Oh my God! What have I done? What has my innocent interaction here brought into being? This is not what I had intended!" The question of who exactly the future feeder/breeders will be now becomes disturbingly indeterminate and alien. A manifesto normally claims to clarify the issues of the future; this wo/manifesto instead gives birth to some future rough beast."


-“Body Info Web: The Internet Poetry of Mez.” [conference paper by George Hartley @ the Modern Language Association International Convention, New Orleans, Louisiana, December 28, 2001.]

"E-poets are not only using computers to pull new words from an existing text and juxtaposewords in new ways but also to break words apart to examine their inner fundamental meaningsand create new associations. Netwurker Mez, for instance, has created a unique network language system _mezangelle_, which brings together her talents as a writer and artist. As Mez explains in an interview on Rhizome, she uses a wide range of textual techniques such as punctuation, homophones, interjection, and variant spellings to infuse her language with potential meanings. Her play with language, symbols, and text evolved from e-mail's often cryptic abbreviations, and she uses mathematical terms both cryptically and subversively:"in2," for example, is the homophone for "into," but it also conveys the idea of splittingsomething into two parts. Her language thus incorporates mathematics, programming, andother code languages to create a language specifically for this new media.

Mez also uses interjected phrases set off in brackets to convey double and triple associations.When interjecting language, "Postmaster" becomes "Post[wo]ma[n]ster"--bringing in immediate associations with gender issues and bringing out the historical associations of master, as well as hinting at other homophones such as monster. Post[wo]ma[n]ster thus takes on many more roles than a simple email address as we examine the deeper implications of mastering, monstering, and gendering the post.

Mez's work, data][h!][bleeding texts, from the The Iowa Review Web, is a gentle introduction into this new playground. In her words, "These t.ex][e][ts r remnants from email performances d-voted to the dispersal of writing that has been n.spired and mutated according 2 the dynamics of an active network." The text itself then moves around on the page, with animated mutations. Mez also uses more than just the text on the computer screen. She uses animated text and images to break down the contexts of her pages. The motion andcomposition of the images, as well as the text, convey her meaning."

-Deena Larsen in _A Quick Buzz around the Universe of Electronic Poetry_ in "Currents in Electronic Literacy Fall 2001 (5)".

"Each time I am wowed by a new piece, it isn't the deftness of the technolgy that is so exciting, it is the fact that each nuance is a new way to say something, a new meaning-signal in the electronic vocabulary of poetry/art/narrative...from Mez' re-invention of words to the altered syntax of the new works in Flash, etc...."

-Marjorie C. Luesebrink

"Einen gedanklichen Schritt über die Perl Poetry hinaus geht Netzdichtung, die ihre Sprache an Computer-Programmiersprachen geschult hat, ohne aber in strikter Befehlssyntax geschrieben zu sein. Die australische Netzlyrikerin mez (Mary Anne Breeze) dichtet in einer selbsterfundenen Kunstsprache "mezangelle", in der sich ASCII Art und Pseudo-Programmcode vermischen:

::Fantazee Genderator::> Assig.n[ation]inge Ov Charact.wh[m]orez 2
[w]Re[ck]quired Fiction.all.lie.sd Para.m[edical] Statuz

::Vari.able[bodie]z::> Prince Cessspit N Princess Pit N
Cin.der.ella[fitzgeraldingz] N Rap[t]punzelle N Gr.etal]

::Will B Mild[h]er than me[aslez] but damaging to the fe[male]tus during
the first try[mester].


[5 Micah Dolls awai.ting AC.TIF.[f]ASHION]

Wie die portmanteau words von Lewis Carroll und James Joyce verschachteln sich die Wörter der mezangelle doppel- und mehrdeutig ineinander. Die rechteckigen Klammern sind Programmiersprachen und gängigen Notationen der Boolschen Algebra entlehnt, in denen sie mehrere Zeichen gleichzeitig referenzieren, also Vieldeutigkeit beschreiben. Diese Polysemie ist, wie in vielen Texten von mez, auch eine der Geschlechter: ,,fe[male]tus`` liest sich simultan als ,,Fötus``, ,,weiblich`` und ,,männlich``. Andere Wörter greifen die Syntax von Dateinamen und Verzeichnisbäumen auf, sowie die Zitierkonventionen von E-Mail und Chats, mit denen das Gedicht seine verschiedenen Sprecher markiert. Die Rede ist von fünf Märchengestalten - ,,Prince Cessspit N Princess Pit N Cin.der.ella[fitzgeraldingz] N Rap[t]punzelle N Gr.etal]`` in einem imaginären Internet-Rollenspiel. Die Spielerin muß eine der vorgegebenen Identitäten annehmen und reflektiert, inwieweit dies ihre eigene Geschlechtsidentität festlegt. In diesen und anderen mez-Gedichten betreibt die "mezangelle" ihr Spiel nicht nur mit den Signifikanten, die sie ineinander metonymisch verschiebt, sondern ihrem Verständnis nach auch mit der Identität der Sprecherin und ihrer sprachlichen Codierung in programmierten Kommunikationssystemen."

- Florian Cramer, "Sub merge {my $enses;
ASCII Art, Rekursion, Lyrik in Programmiersprachen"

"... i dont know how others find it, but i do tons of programming and [mez's] style is just the most delightful play on coding. i kinda think of her as a cross between James Joyce and... Larry Wall -- author of the Perl programming language and a linguist by training....."

les schaffer

Write sites: Kirsten Krauth looks at words on the net.
"A chaotic landscape of new language. Words crossed out become strong enough to explode. A challenge, this cybernetic form like Shakespeare, inventive and striking. Fleshis.tics, an erotic mo[ve]ment, a roll of the code. I am getting overtaken by square brackets. The question at the bottom of the scroll bar r u cur[e].i.ous? and yes, I am, I am in a hurry to control and master these strokes, these unconventions."
-Reprinted from Realtime, Issue 27.

"This is a deliberate
utilization of space and typography. Think of it as the inverse of your
rejection of caps, quotes, and etc., the iconography of the normal."


-George Trail

"...the fact that the messages [mez sends] are--i'm not sure what the right word would be--generous? open?--that's really important."

-Ted Byfield, nettime.

"Think of it as an electronic Emily Dickinson."
-George Trail

"Or E. E. Cummings.

In a way the [bracketed] words introduce a kind of
hypertextuality to a nominally plain text piece, allowing
for different readings each time through, or parallel
readings. Walter Benjamin would be proud."


-Brad Weslake

"Mez for me is somewhere between 7-11 and being human - in and out of the protocols...what's fascinating about Mez' work is that even the frame is sliding, and the syntax itself owes something to hackerese (as does Integer's in another direction) - there's also a question about punctuation - which isn't ..Creeleyesque or even poetics/poetry - not based on the breath or the Huh, but on a semantics
almost out of control. "

-Alan Sondheim, Cyberculture

"As regards Mez's writing, I am honoured that she writes to our list. She is showing us how new texts are being made right now..."

Sue Thomas, trAce International Writing Community

"Australian net artist Mary-anne Breeze works far from the terminally plugged-in commercial web sites where the dead-end race for more technology serve only the purpose of software and hardware vendors posing as dubious backstabbing friends of the arts. Taking hold of the essential tools of the web based artist, HTML (the prosaic layout constructing language) and .GIF images (a file type that enables animation while loading), she focuses on the emotional unfolding that she crafts by pushing the inherent constricting features of those standards to their creative limits.

The Mez site is continuously updated and face changing, as is her online personality currently know as mezflesque.exe. One can find there pointers to her whole scattered body of work starting from the early incarnation of "blood puppets", dripping tortured beings in ascii soul torment, to the last adventures in "los++eX+ wand_err_ing" where the compositions rely only on the superimposition of the disintegrating words "lost text" unto a wallpaper of mosaiced polymorphous organic assemblages. The commonality in the chosen themes revolve around the body, the flesh, skin and organs, as the words shape the metaphorical bones that hold together the bulging throbbing red attachments slowly mutating and growing or cringing to a poetic pulp. The text itself is malformed, as expressionist as the fonts possibility let themselves twist to; screaming strikethroughs of suppressed needs, underlined and bold whispers of cyber femininity. When the background animated images themselves are blurred permutative texts that compose the gristle of an alien womb that spews forth its own decomposed verbiage, the aesthetic mastery of Mez can become invigoratingly disorienting.

In terms of technology it's a bare knuckles fighter attacking neutron bomb-armed bots but the plagued life forms that populate the strangely parallel world of Mez do not need industrialized props. They, like us, prefer to survive on their own imagination and the slimy harvests of their loving peers."

- Frederic Madre, editor of pleine-peau.

Reprinted from "artists newsletter", London.

From: "Lisa Singh"
Subject: RE: trAns-late-ion in prog.[w]ress[+le]
i spent some time this morning hunting down some of the internet sights where mez's work is highlighted. what prompted my hunt was a walk throughthe archives and a discussion sue started on programmer poets. i had already been fascinated with mez's creativity and unique construction of words into symbols. what is exciting is how much is being done with words and how it changes or enhances meaning.
for example, the word progress is represented as prog.[w]ress[+le}]. This is accurate for us, the readers, in that in the translation which is being referred to we do have to wrestle with the meaning. notice how the w and +le are in brackets indicated that they add hidden meaning to the word, yet remain silent in pronunciation. so that two ideas are being conveyed at the same time.
other examples:
interactions = intrACTions with emphasis on the act which is what interactions are -- actions between two individuals. so that the visual presentation of the word imparts as much meaning as the word itself.
imagination = image.innate.I.On which in my interpretation is an image
which is translated innately when we put our I or ourselves On it.
not all of the words lend themselves to multiple layers of meaning easily or at all. but the mere presence of the layers in other words makes
translation fun and exciting. it also stimulates the mind to discovery.

"Mez's writings are fascinating...different...seemingly
highly experimental. I'd like to know more about that
technique."

-Pam Casto