“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]
