28/05/2012

"Mez Breeze's new book is called "Human Readable Messages." So perhaps a distinction needs to be made between human-readable glitches and machine-readable glitches. Human-readable glitches are media glitches -- they occur when humans are communicating to humans through machines which mediate this communication. Human-readable glitches don't freak machines out. But neither do machine-readable glitches. Machine-readable glitches may crash machines, but that doesn't freak machines out, because machines have no sentient expectation of "normal." Machines lack the ability to have an uncanny experience. So to limit the discussion of glitches to events that only happen within machinic systems, glitches which never run on or involve human bodies, is to talk about something quite limited. Because a machine can't know or experience a glitch. Only a human can."

- Curt Cloninger, "glitch device/divide".

27/05/2012

"In Mez's work, the digital poet combines code and language to create, what she calls, mezangelle. She uses mezangelle throughout her...hypertext pieces called Datableeding... Upon the entry of Datableeding one is faced with the option of going through the poetic journey in chronological order or starting with a number and theme...Starting with the Electroduction, the user is asked to type in a secret name and then the journey begins. This is where the user gets to see the mezangelle in action...A real test for the brain occurs once the user clicks on one of the hyperlinks inside the box of .THE CON.SOUL.E...the user is presented with a poetic set of words that disappear once the cursor is moved over a different name section and yet again the text is completely changed to reveal a different meaning. In next section Cloh!neing god N Angel-z the user is stimulated with audio and visual of images of angles being copied onto the screen as if being scanned by a copy machine."

- Keith Whittaker in Media Art Histories and Genealogies.

07/05/2012

"The range of work shortlisted for the awards was an eye-opener for me personally in terms of what I might consider “fiction” and “poetry” to be in the e-lit context...the list included a number of works that took radically different approaches to the form and interface of fiction [such as] Mez’s the data[h!]bleeding texts written in her particularly styled mutation of human and machine language..."

- Scott Rettberg, Developing an Identity for the Field of Electronic Literature: Reflections on the Electronic Literature Organization Archives

06/05/2012

"Critical Code Studies finds code meaningful not as text but "as a text," an artifact of a digital moment, full of hooks for discussing digital culture and programming communities. I should note that Critical Code Studies also looks at code separated from functioning software as in the case of some codework poetry, such as Mez's work or Zach Blas' transCoder anti-programming language. To that extent, Critical Code Studies is also interested in the culture of code, the art of code, and code in culture more broadly."

- Mark Marino and Henry Jenkins, "How Can We Understand Code as a 'Critical Artifact'?"