“...common practice - a series of curated events that wants to use an “unpredictable cobbling together of texts, poetry, people, code, language, Wiki, chat, conversations etc” to create new texts...some more about what the event entails:

The reading groups that make up common practice will take place in June and September. You are invited to read, write, tinker with and intervene in the literary and theoretical texts and poetry together with others through the simple-to-use online tools. You can join us in the Reading Room at Arnolfini or online and via Skype (contact: common practice).

common practice references the widespread and increasingly familiar activity of using online tools in everyday to communicate, contact, work, socialise, play, research, be entertained, etc. The practice embodies the curiosity to experience ways in which human and machine skills and abilities perform together.

More importantly, however, common practice also refers to the fact that it is done in common – together with others. Thus it is social space of knowledge materialised through co-labour, codeworking and language.

The first session will open with mez breeze’s mezangelle poems, written in a blend of code and language, and we will be practising a simultaneous reading-writing reworking of these texts to experience their language-code operations during the event.”

-From Open source poetries by Jeroenn.

“...this sort of “dirty hands” approach can just as easily describe digital poems such as Mez Breeze’s “pro][tean][.lapsing.txts” which is an imitation of computer code (written in what she calls “mezangelle”) and thus the code is the poem, the visible, also primarily visual, surface text of the work (this in contrast to the way in which code is almost always the invisible, underlying layer which is responsible for make a different surface text visible). Once again, as with “Carnival,” the text is just as much about making visible the work of coding as it is about what the coding semantically communicates. And it can also nicely describe a whole range of recent open-source, community-driven artistic/cultural phenomenon such as the demo-scene, chiptune music scene, Maker Faire, or any of the burgeoning DIY electronics and robotics movements supported by companies such as Makerbot (a start-up company that creates open-source 3-d printers that you can by for $700-800 and put together yourself) or Arduino (an open-source electronics prototyping platform based on flexible, easy-to-use hardware and software intended for artists, designers, hobbyists, and anyone interested in creating interactive objects or environments).”

- From Making as Meaning: from Dirty Concrete to Critical Code, Lori-Emerson.

"In the works of Mez (Maryanne Breeze), she creates works written in what N. Katherine Hayles has called a creole of computer and human languages. Mez, and other codework authors, display the data layer on the presentation layer. One critical response is to point out that as an information system, the presentation layer are the lines of code and the rest of the system is whatever medium is displaying her poem. However, such an approach missed the very complexity of Mez's work. Indeed, Mez's work is often traditional static text that puts users in the role of the processor...

Consider her short codework "_trEm[d]o[lls]r_" published on her site and on the Critical Code Studies blog. It is a program that seems to describe (or self-define) the birth pangs of a new world. The work, written in what appears to be XML, cannot function by itself. It appears to assign a value to a variable named "doll_tre[ru]mor[s]", a Mez-ian (Mezozoic?) portmenteau of doll_tremors and rumors. This particular rumor being defined is called, the fifth world, which calls up images of the Native American belief in a the perfected world coming to replace our current fourth world. This belief appears most readily in the Hopi tribe of North America. A child of this fifth world are "fractures," or put another way, the tremor of the coming world brings with it fractures. The first, post 2 inscription, contains polymers: a user set to "YourDollUserName," a "3rdperson" set to "Your3rdPerson," a location set to "YourSoddenSelf", and a "spikey" set to "YourSpiKeySelf." The user then becomes a molecule name within the fracture, a component of the fracture. These references to dolls and 3rd person seem to evoke the world of avatars. In virtual worlds, users have dolls.

If the first fracture is located in the avatar of the person, in their avatar, the second centers on communication from this person or user. Here the user is defined with "YourPolyannaUserName," and we are in the world of overreaching optimism, in the face of a "msg" or message of "YourPleading" and a "lastword." Combining these two fractures we have a sodden and spikey self pleading and uttering a last word presumably before the coming rupture into the fifth world.

As with many codeworks, the presentation layer appears to be the data and logic layer. However, there is clearly another logic layer that makes these words appear on whatever interface the reader is using. Thus, the presentation layer is a deception, a challenge to the very division of layers, a revelation that hides. At the same time, we are compelled to execute the presented code by tracing out its logic. We must take the place of the compiler with the understanding that the coding structures are also meant to launch allusive subroutines, that part of our brain that is constantly listening for echoes and whispers.

To produce that reading, we have had to execute that poem, at least step through it, acting as the processor...Where traditional poetry establishes identity through I's, Mez has us identify with a system ready to process the user who is not ready for the fifth world, whatever that may bring. At the same time, universal or even mythical realities have been systematized or simulated. There is another layer of data that is missing, supplied by the user presumably. The poem leaves its tremors in a state of potential, waiting to operate in the context of a larger system and waiting for a user to supply the names, pleading, and last words..."

From "Electronic Literature as an Information System", Juan B. Gutierrez/CAVIIAR (Advanced Research Center in Artificial Intelligence), Mark C. Marino (University of Southern California), Pablo Gervás (Universidad Complutense de Madrid), and Laura Borràs Castanyer (Universidad Oberta de Catalunya),

"...To grasp the difference between ludic and experimental dysfunctionality, let's compare the Shakespeare program discussed...with the use of graphic elements inspired by computer code in Mezangelle, the hybrid language developed by the Australian author Mez:

($gene (x y)

chambered

((not? (promise? y))

(iambic.pent((up))a)meter

(set-(h)eart(h)! (var x) y) ;

(set-earth! (var x) ()) ; delete y)

(quoted from Net Behaviour)

The Shakespeare program tries to hide that it is a piece of computer code, by imitating a dramatic script. Here it is the other way around. The poem tries to pass as computer code, by imitating the syntax of a computer language (it most resembles LISP), and by using special graphic elements, but it cannot be executed: there is no compiler for this pseudo language. The purpose here is not to communicate with the machine, but rather, following a tradition that runs from nineteenth century Symbolism to twentieth century Dadaism, Surrealism, Lettrism, and concrete poetry, to produce a new poetic idiom. The use of parentheses is symptomatic of an ambition to fight the linearity of language by rendering symbols semantically polyvalent: for instance, in the Mez example, " (h)eart(h)." can be read as "heart," "earth" or "hearth." Whether of not these language experiments produce dysfunctionality or a functionality of a higher order depends on how much effort readers are willing to devote to their decoding, and on whether this effort is found worthwhile. Similarly, there are people who find the language of Finnegans Wake highly dysfunctional, and others who admire it as a synthesis of different languages that overcomes the disaster of Babel. (Incidentally, Mezangelle has been widely compared to Finnegans Wake.)"

From _Between Play and Politics: Dysfunctionality in Digital Art_, electronic book review
Marie-Laure Ryan

"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

"...what happens if and when texts are produced in which the technical and cultural practices of electronic writing are combined, as in the case of codeworks? Here notions of authorship are problematized, as codeworks are produced by entities or avatars such as Mez, Antiorp, and JODI, which may or may not be machinic, and which blur the boundaries between art and writing, poetic language and computer code."

-Gary Hall in Digitize This Book!

Publisher: University of Minnesota Press, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-8166-4870-2

"The self that results is actively defined in terms of its connections and associations, in varying degrees of intimacy and intensity. The emphasis is not on person but persona: as Mez Breeze has suggested, this self is an assembly generated through clusters of distributed identity markers, which does not add up to stable meanings or ground level actualities because it also coalesces in terms of the volume, degree and intensity of its connections. Less a reductive experientiality than a connective extensibility."

-Jordan Crandall, Artivistic 2009 Lecture.