"It was not so much Google Wave that was impressive, but Mez's ability to write through and across it. She broached a variety of things we've been discussing...networked writing, shifting literacies, learning to embrace the glitch and the beauty of Mezangelle. And she did it in a form that reiterated the content. That's what made it inspiring."
-Renee Turner, Piet Zwart Institute
Showing posts with label netwurker. Show all posts
Showing posts with label netwurker. Show all posts
19/05/2009
"netwurker makes me wonder if Derrida predicted text msging and twitter-speak. The post above is so delightfully double (multiply?) coded and self-deconstructing."
-Jonny Gray
-Jonny Gray
12/05/2009
"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.
- Dr. Kane X. Faucher
The University of Western Ontario.
06/02/2007
"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.
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.
"Mez (is) a prolific multimedia poet and net artist...“Net.wurker” is her own term. She writes in a cryptic-but-decodable, fissured, Joycean-cummings and rhizomic language dubbed “mezangelle”, forcing the reader to puzzle out and open up possibilities even before any technical interactivity/multimodality a la Flash kicks in....Java Museum is showcasing a cross-section of her work 1995-2002. The scope and depth, the reflexive prescient analysis, and the sheer intricate, exquisite, evocative, enigmatic verbal nanotech—extraordinary. Explore it....Check out her new work, Monitored [from ][ad][Dressed in a Skin C.ode]. It’s a kind of condensed manifesto: the corporeal in (not just versus) the machinic, the visceral emotion phrased in coded calligrams, the vividly-dramatic underneath the fixed text. It consists of crossword-Scrabbled diagrams using individual keyboard letters, which on rollover unfold into poetry, soldered on circuit/chip schematics in glorious Mondrian colours. The word-total’s tiny but the rabbit-hat trick with interpretations and proliferating readings is amazing, clued in by the sonogram/ultrasound pulse and the expanded-title “S][ervo]all Monito.red][heart] [Beats”.
The essay is the antonym of mezangelle."
-Dean Kiley, Realtime, Issue 47
The essay is the antonym of mezangelle."
-Dean Kiley, Realtime, Issue 47
"...Without addressing these issues directly through a who-dun-it plot, Mez redeems the Internet which is one of the hottest topics in the society of today. Her 'mezangelle' language installs a non-linear and imaginative order into the seemingly pointless gibberish of e-mail communication.
In the beginning of the navigation through the Datableeding texts , Mez playfully takes a symbolic blood sample from the viewer, who is invited to confide in her and write down his/her childhood nickname. With the viewer's nickname becoming part the verses on the following page, he/she is initiated into the communication process as an act of creating culture. The syncopated recital of enchanting verses written in this personalized synthetic 'mezangelle' language combines pieces of collective and anonymous e-mail chatting.
Mez composes the texts by inter-penetration of different layers of writing, codes and signs which have become the vernacular of communication through e-mails. The language is enticing and onomatopoeic. Its refreshing quality recalls the ways in which a child learns to speak, freely making up names for the things she observes, and making sense of the universe or simply repeating in peculiar ways what others have said. The artist breaks the stereotypical categorizations of Internet communication by placing the viewer in the position of the child who is learning a new language. Another aspect of the strangeness of the ingenious 'mezangelle' is that it makes us think twice when we say that English is the language of the Internet because the Datableeding texts project suggests that the wide use of English on the Net is transforming the language and the innovations are rapidly spreading off-line.
No longer obeying the rules of grammar, linear language in this project goes out of control and splinters into words and codes governed by a new syntax. The use of the Internet is a practice which engenders idiomatic expressions of its own. In the extensively popular analogy between the Web and the human blood system the texts are seething with life and the pixels are 'stirred,' infused with energy circulating in a flow just as blood cells. The grand finale of cloning angels, the mythological messengers inhabiting the ether, reverberates over the texts as echoes of angelic voices. The artist 'channels' the 'blood' stream of the Datableeding texts , gently carrying the viewer from the Net codes toward the codes of the next so-called revolution: that of genetic engineering."
- Rossitza Daskalova, CIAC Magazine 13th edition, _Language transformed by the machine_.
In the beginning of the navigation through the Datableeding texts , Mez playfully takes a symbolic blood sample from the viewer, who is invited to confide in her and write down his/her childhood nickname. With the viewer's nickname becoming part the verses on the following page, he/she is initiated into the communication process as an act of creating culture. The syncopated recital of enchanting verses written in this personalized synthetic 'mezangelle' language combines pieces of collective and anonymous e-mail chatting.
Mez composes the texts by inter-penetration of different layers of writing, codes and signs which have become the vernacular of communication through e-mails. The language is enticing and onomatopoeic. Its refreshing quality recalls the ways in which a child learns to speak, freely making up names for the things she observes, and making sense of the universe or simply repeating in peculiar ways what others have said. The artist breaks the stereotypical categorizations of Internet communication by placing the viewer in the position of the child who is learning a new language. Another aspect of the strangeness of the ingenious 'mezangelle' is that it makes us think twice when we say that English is the language of the Internet because the Datableeding texts project suggests that the wide use of English on the Net is transforming the language and the innovations are rapidly spreading off-line.
No longer obeying the rules of grammar, linear language in this project goes out of control and splinters into words and codes governed by a new syntax. The use of the Internet is a practice which engenders idiomatic expressions of its own. In the extensively popular analogy between the Web and the human blood system the texts are seething with life and the pixels are 'stirred,' infused with energy circulating in a flow just as blood cells. The grand finale of cloning angels, the mythological messengers inhabiting the ether, reverberates over the texts as echoes of angelic voices. The artist 'channels' the 'blood' stream of the Datableeding texts , gently carrying the viewer from the Net codes toward the codes of the next so-called revolution: that of genetic engineering."
- Rossitza Daskalova, CIAC Magazine 13th edition, _Language transformed by the machine_.
"There are several pieces where text, sound, movement and interactivity all seek to support one another in a complex lyrical or narrative whole.....an example of an enhanced package [is] from _][ad][Dressed in a Skin C.ode_ by Mary-Anne Breeze [alias mez], with its invented mezangelle system [which shows] her enthusiasm for elaborate punning and inventive programming...."
-Robert Coover's keynote address at ELO's State of the Arts Symposium 2002.
-Robert Coover's keynote address at ELO's State of the Arts Symposium 2002.
"mez's writings are, in my view, examples of reflecting the virulence of digital text without actually coding in programming language. - The beauty of 'mezangelle' is that it uses elements of programming language syntax as material, i.e. reflecting formal programming language without being one. Of course, many other aesthetic options in Internet poetry exist, and many of them may have an aesthetics which totally separates the textuality of the digital poem from the internal textuality of the machine. I just prefer if the latter is the product of an aesthetically conscious decision _against_ algorithmic coding (i.e. as its negative reflection)."
+
"If it doesn't (conceptually, aesthetically) matter at all for a work whether it resides on the CD-ROM or in the Internet, then I have difficulties calling it "net literature". The fact that something displays in a browser isn't enough to make it, to quote mez, a "net wurk". You might consider it picky, but in my view "net literature" and "digital literature" aren't synonymous per se,
although they frequently intersect today. I could, for example, think of a lot of analog "net literature", like Mail Art or even 18th century letter novels, or Japanese renshi poetry."
+
"The code poetry of, among others, mez, Alan Sondheim and Ted Warnell seems to build on two developments a) the re-coding of traditional pictorial ASCII art into amimetical noise signals by net artists like Jodi, antiorp, mi-ga and Frederic Madre, (b) the mass proliferation of programming language syntax through web and multimedia scripting languages and search engines. For the reader of mez's "netwurks", it remains all the more an open question whether the "mezangelle" para-code of parentheses and wildcard characters only mimics programming languages or is, at least partially, the product of programmed text filtering."[in cream 1: Collaborative Research into Electronic Art Memes]
-Florian Cramer, lecturer in Comparative Literature at Freie Universität Berlin.
+
"If it doesn't (conceptually, aesthetically) matter at all for a work whether it resides on the CD-ROM or in the Internet, then I have difficulties calling it "net literature". The fact that something displays in a browser isn't enough to make it, to quote mez, a "net wurk". You might consider it picky, but in my view "net literature" and "digital literature" aren't synonymous per se,
although they frequently intersect today. I could, for example, think of a lot of analog "net literature", like Mail Art or even 18th century letter novels, or Japanese renshi poetry."
+
"The code poetry of, among others, mez, Alan Sondheim and Ted Warnell seems to build on two developments a) the re-coding of traditional pictorial ASCII art into amimetical noise signals by net artists like Jodi, antiorp, mi-ga and Frederic Madre, (b) the mass proliferation of programming language syntax through web and multimedia scripting languages and search engines. For the reader of mez's "netwurks", it remains all the more an open question whether the "mezangelle" para-code of parentheses and wildcard characters only mimics programming languages or is, at least partially, the product of programmed text filtering."[in cream 1: Collaborative Research into Electronic Art Memes]
-Florian Cramer, lecturer in Comparative Literature at Freie Universität Berlin.
“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]
…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]
"The Australian codeworker Mez has developed a distinctive prose style that she calls mezangelle…Rather than link discrete blocs of text, or “lexias”, to each other, Mez introduces the hypertext principle of multiplicity into the word itself. Rather than produce alternative trajectories through the text on the hypertext principle of “choice,” here they co-exist within the same textual space.
The interest of Mez’s writings is not limited to this distinctive approach to the text. While the words split and merge on the screen, the authoring “avatar” behind them is also in a state of flux. Texts issue, in various forms in various places, from data[h!bleeder, Phonet][r][ix, netwurker, and many other heteronyms…At the heart of the codeworking enterprise is a call for a revised approach to language itself."
-McKenzie Wark in _Codework_ [American Book Review, Sept/Oct 2001]
The interest of Mez’s writings is not limited to this distinctive approach to the text. While the words split and merge on the screen, the authoring “avatar” behind them is also in a state of flux. Texts issue, in various forms in various places, from data[h!bleeder, Phonet][r][ix, netwurker, and many other heteronyms…At the heart of the codeworking enterprise is a call for a revised approach to language itself."
-McKenzie Wark in _Codework_ [American Book Review, Sept/Oct 2001]
05/02/2007
"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 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)".
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