"Claes Oldenburg has a sculpture in the form of a giant safety pin. It isn't a safety pin; it can't be operated like one. It's there to look at and to be part of the space around the viewer. The fact that it doesn't work is part of the design, not a defect. Mary Flanagan has a sculpture that is a giant joystick, and is a functioning joystick that allows people (ideally, more than one) to play Atari VCS games. It's supposed to work, by design; that's an essential part of the concept. So, it makes sense to me to imagine how Mez's codework or Oldenburg's safety pin would operate if they did work, but to me it is less reasonable and productive to actually try to engineer a working safety pin out of the existing sculpture or a working compiler for existing codework texts."

-Nick Montfort, Critical Code Studies Working Group 2014.

"....'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.

"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)

"... 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