06/02/2007

"...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_.