27/07/2014

"For many immigrants, creole is a way to carve out their own language from within a dominant one. With her “mezangelle”, Mez creates a minor language using dominant languages of humans and machine - a kind of creole that disrupts the prescribed utility of both word and code, opening them up to new meaning and play..." [From Illya Szilak's #ELO2014 Keynote Address]

16/06/2014


"The history of the culture of AI is one of rigorous great failure. AI is a form of literature, the tragedic drama of the hacker class. Mez is indeed relevant here as the mirror image of AI, "Turings Man" ironized..."

- Rob Myers, RHIZOME_DISCUSS.
"For those that don’t know, Mez is a legend in digital arts. She is internationally known for her digital works, including inventing her own language... Both Mez and Jason Nelson are two giants in electronic literature that we have here in Australia. It is a pleasure to know, and be encouraged, by both of them."

- Christy Dena, Universe Creation 101.

08/03/2014

"Mezangelle seems to really take something *from* the code and bring it into speech, to recognize some element in a nevertheless masculinist programming language as feminist, as worth freeing from its context and allowing it to work in some other way..."

- Ebuswell, Critical Code Studies Working Group 2014.

05/03/2014

"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.

02/02/2014

"Mez (aka Mary-Anne Breeze) ties experimental language to avatar creation and collaborative networking to explore complex and often contested political and social themes. The originality of her approach with its rich integration of the various aspects of her praxis has repercussions beyond aesthetics:

When Breeze transformed herself into Ms. Post Modernism, she felt obligated to represent that with a description of a physical act of self-mutilation: cutting out one's face so that it can be removed and replaced. Today, when Breeze posts to listservs, she posts under avatars that only exist for a few weeks or a few days, often reflecting a political or social issue on her mind, before she finally discards that avatar for a new one. The process of transforming her identity seems mundane and easy, just as it seems to anyone else who participates in these online environments long enough. (Reep)

Mez's precursors in print fiction include Kathy Acker, Among other works, Kathy Acker's Empire of the senseless. whose surreal and terrible prose seems to have been semantically dismantled by Mez's more technologically engaged praxis. Both stretch language and genre until only thin tendrils of reference to mainstream literature remain. These thin tendrils are even more nebulous in Mez's case, since she distributes her work, and indeed, shares "ownership" of her work, in ways that exist beyond the scope of the capitalist print fiction industry."

- "Language rules" by Geniwate, Electronic Book Review