_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].