"You probably know the fabulous Mez for her signature codework language mezangelle or for her fabulous collaborations with Andy Campbell, but Mez was also one of my chief mentors in netprov. Back when Workstudy Seth was running my social media, Mez gave me advice from afar, guiding me away from some real "danger zones," as Archer would call them. Truly with her online personas, she's been performing one of the longest-running netprovs around. In our special issue of Hyperrhiz, Mez presents two #netprovs: #OutsideurDoor and _feralC. Read about them and sample some transcripts here." - Mark Marino, Hyperrhiz.

"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.

"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.

"My initial inspiration, despite my overweening obsession with etymology and a rank fascination with the history of words, was in being introduced to the code poetry of Mezangelle and the intrepid explorations of those like Vuk Cosic and Alan Sondheim. As is my habit, I long pondered the very word "code" and explored its variations in language, thus coming to a notion (pirated from Deleuze and Guattari) that I dubbed de/re-coding."

- Dr. Kane X. Faucher
The University of Western Ontario.

“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]

" 'Sky Scratchez' is a collaboration between Mez and myself...

The writing (as in words) is almost exclusive Mez's. (with the exception of
a few pop-up segments of my own, which are commentary [of a sort] on Mez's writing... )

The functionality and the design of the piece is almost exclusively mine, though heavily inspired by my reading of Mez's 'sky scratchez' words."

-Talan Memmott, Beehive

"The work of Mez net_wurker or Mary Anne Breeze, also displays a kind of syllable and letter parataxis. Developed on the Web, in discussion groups via e-mail, and using Flash animation to insert syllables into words, between words, moving in and out of words, Mez's mezangelle poetic language translates well onto paper. Mez's parenthetic splitting of words, changes the way you first read the word when you rescan it and make a new combination of syllables within the one word. It's a parataxis of letters and syllables within words.

In this poem by Mez, distributed via email discussion lists (WebArtery), one gets a feeling of computer HTML code, which seems to characterize Mez's style, but it is the breaking up of words with parentheses into letters and syllables that makes for interesting recombinations. It is a poem about a woman, the use of the deliberately gendered expression tells us that. Whether it is the author's head or the subject's head that is full we don't know, but maybe both. The next line is a mix of ritualistic and red lipstick, there is a conflict here and it is a women's conflict. The language is sourced in youth and vitriol, ego-blasting, e-blasting via the web, gob-blasting, mouthing discontents. There is grandstanding and attention seeking, and strutting of ego or egos. The battle continues, involving others, debate is heated. c.rowd[y] of warring codes, angels become demons, the man-eating shark becomes the man, eating shark. The headhuntress is named and ascends the throne, to be attacked, she cracks, and so does her support. The sanity of the subject is questioned, the damage done by remaining silent, the ritual of censorship/the rite of incensed worship is a brilliant mezangelle line. And are the black and white obscenities, words on a screen or on a page? The next line is also quite brilliant, the authoritarian nature of the command beginning with u. must is reinforced by the inclusion of [& dad voice]. This stanza speaks of one way compromise, of subjection to the authority, of restoring the status quo. The last stanza the action of interrogation/the act of interception, continues the argument in cyberspace, murder me through atoms, [www]walls, and the last line I read as moderator status, hiatus, versus you always.


Mez's parataxis of syllable and letter, within words themselves, sets up a poetic experience where the words clash within themselves, their internal workings in opposition, disrupting the way we read as language and forcing a closer examination of the text, creating new meanings with the text. Encountered on e-mail discussion lists, the text as such is difficult to read and requires the creation of a space to receive this text. Many listees reject the challenge, and label it spam without having engaged in its language or followed its development from post to post. But those who embrace it become active and enthusiastic practitioners."

-komninos zervos in "The new forms and devices of poetry in cyberspace." The North American Centre for Interdisciplinary Poetics.

"The allegorical figuration of the traumatic irruption of the Real seems to lie at the heart of Mez's recent work, " >di][e][lation manifesto-:-a sliver of the future f][br][eeder< ." Here the mouse click serves to destabilize the interactor. First of all, the question is where to click? Web navigation usually proceeds from the interactor's recognition of a significant "button," a visual element promising to function as a hyperlink and as such to fulfill the interactor's freedom in interactivity. But the visual clues, made up either of garbled word chunks or opaque code-like punctuation series, are barely clues at all. Once the interactor does click on the right buttons, however, popup windows appear. And here is where the traumatic irruption of History seems to be figured: what we get when we click on a button is either a scrollable mini-window containing more disjointed text OR a popup window containing a Flash movie, each one featuring some new alien creature who comes closer and closer to our faces, all the while giving off or being accompanied by some disturbing sound that somehow resembles the sounds of breathing or of a bodily pulse. "Oh my God! What have I done? What has my innocent interaction here brought into being? This is not what I had intended!" The question of who exactly the future feeder/breeders will be now becomes disturbingly indeterminate and alien. A manifesto normally claims to clarify the issues of the future; this wo/manifesto instead gives birth to some future rough beast."


-“Body Info Web: The Internet Poetry of Mez.” [conference paper by George Hartley @ the Modern Language Association International Convention, New Orleans, Louisiana, December 28, 2001.]

"E-poets are not only using computers to pull new words from an existing text and juxtaposewords in new ways but also to break words apart to examine their inner fundamental meaningsand create new associations. Netwurker Mez, for instance, has created a unique network language system _mezangelle_, which brings together her talents as a writer and artist. As Mez explains in an interview on Rhizome, she uses a wide range of textual techniques such as punctuation, homophones, interjection, and variant spellings to infuse her language with potential meanings. Her play with language, symbols, and text evolved from e-mail's often cryptic abbreviations, and she uses mathematical terms both cryptically and subversively:"in2," for example, is the homophone for "into," but it also conveys the idea of splittingsomething into two parts. Her language thus incorporates mathematics, programming, andother code languages to create a language specifically for this new media.

Mez also uses interjected phrases set off in brackets to convey double and triple associations.When interjecting language, "Postmaster" becomes "Post[wo]ma[n]ster"--bringing in immediate associations with gender issues and bringing out the historical associations of master, as well as hinting at other homophones such as monster. Post[wo]ma[n]ster thus takes on many more roles than a simple email address as we examine the deeper implications of mastering, monstering, and gendering the post.

Mez's work, data][h!][bleeding texts, from the The Iowa Review Web, is a gentle introduction into this new playground. In her words, "These t.ex][e][ts r remnants from email performances d-voted to the dispersal of writing that has been n.spired and mutated according 2 the dynamics of an active network." The text itself then moves around on the page, with animated mutations. Mez also uses more than just the text on the computer screen. She uses animated text and images to break down the contexts of her pages. The motion andcomposition of the images, as well as the text, convey her meaning."

-Deena Larsen in _A Quick Buzz around the Universe of Electronic Poetry_ in "Currents in Electronic Literacy Fall 2001 (5)".

"Mez for me is somewhere between 7-11 and being human - in and out of the protocols...what's fascinating about Mez' work is that even the frame is sliding, and the syntax itself owes something to hackerese (as does Integer's in another direction) - there's also a question about punctuation - which isn't ..Creeleyesque or even poetics/poetry - not based on the breath or the Huh, but on a semantics
almost out of control. "

-Alan Sondheim, Cyberculture

"Mez's writings are fascinating...different...seemingly
highly experimental. I'd like to know more about that
technique."

-Pam Casto