mezangelle is a poetic-artistic

language Language is a structured system of communication. The structure of a language is its grammar and the free components are its vocabulary. Languages are the primary means by which humans communicate, and may be conveyed through a variety of met ...

developed in the 1990s by

Australia Australia, officially the Commonwealth of Australia, is a Sovereign state, sovereign country comprising the mainland of the Australia (continent), Australian continent, the island of Tasmania, and numerous List of islands of Australia, sma ...

n-based

Internet art upright=1.3, "Simple Net Art Diagram", a 1997 work by Michael Sarff and Tim Whidden Internet art (also known as net art) is a form of new media art distributed via the Internet. This form of art circumvents the traditional dominance of the phys ...

ist

Mez Breeze Mez Breeze is an Australian-based artist and practitioner of net.art, working primarily with code poetry, electronic literature, mezangelle, and digital games. Born Mary-Anne Breeze, she uses a number of avatar nicknames, including Mez and Netw ...

(Mary-Anne Breeze). It is recognized as a central contribution to Codework,

Electronic literature Electronic literature or digital literature is a genre of literature encompassing works created exclusively on and for digital devices, such as computers, tablets, and mobile phones. A work of electronic literature can be defined as "a constr ...

Internet Art upright=1.3, "Simple Net Art Diagram", a 1997 work by Michael Sarff and Tim Whidden Internet art (also known as net art) is a form of new media art distributed via the Internet. This form of art circumvents the traditional dominance of the phys ...

and digital writing in general.

Definition and characteristics

mezangelle is primarily based on

hybrid word A hybrid word or hybridism is a word that etymologically derives from at least two languages. Common hybrids The most common form of hybrid word in English combines Latin and Greek parts. Since many prefixes and suffixes in English are of Latin ...

s. Like the

portmanteau word A portmanteau word, or portmanteau (, ) is a blend of wordsLewis Carroll Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (; 27 January 1832 – 14 January 1898), better known by his pen name Lewis Carroll, was an English author, poet and mathematician. His most notable works are ''Alice's Adventures in Wonderland'' (1865) and its sequel ...

or used in

James Joyce James Augustine Aloysius Joyce (2 February 1882 – 13 January 1941) was an Irish novelist, poet, and literary critic. He contributed to the modernist avant-garde movement and is regarded as one of the most influential and important writers of ...

's novel ''Finnegans Wake'', it dissects and recombines language and stacks multiple layers of meanings into single phrases. It is an Internet-cultural poetic language deriving much of its tension from incorporating formal

code In communications and information processing, code is a system of rules to convert information—such as a letter, word, sound, image, or gesture—into another form, sometimes shortened or secret, for communication through a communication ...

and informal speech at once. Its base construction qualifies it as

hypertext Hypertext is E-text, text displayed on a computer display or other electronic devices with references (hyperlinks) to other text that the reader can immediately access. Hypertext documents are interconnected by hyperlinks, which are typi ...

on a morphological and grammatical level. It is not syntactically fixed and is in continuous artistic development. mezangelle mixes

English English usually refers to: * English language * English people English may also refer to: Peoples, culture, and language * ''English'', an adjective for something of, from, or related to England ** English national ide ...

ASCII art ASCII art is a graphic design technique that uses computers for presentation and consists of pictures pieced together from the 95 printable (from a total of 128) characters defined by the ASCII Standard from 1963 and ASCII compliant chara ...

, fragments from

programming language A programming language is a system of notation for writing computer programs. Most programming languages are text-based formal languages, but they may also be graphical. They are a kind of computer language. The description of a programming ...

source code In computing, source code, or simply code, is any collection of code, with or without comments, written using a human-readable programming language, usually as plain text. The source code of a program is specially designed to facilitate the wo ...

markup language Markup language refers to a text-encoding system consisting of a set of symbols inserted in a text document to control its structure, formatting, or the relationship between its parts. Markup is often used to control the display of the document ...

regular expression A regular expression (shortened as regex or regexp; sometimes referred to as rational expression) is a sequence of characters that specifies a search pattern in text. Usually such patterns are used by string-searching algorithms for "find" or ...

s and wildcard patterns, protocol code,

IRC Internet Relay Chat (IRC) is a text-based chat system for instant messaging. IRC is designed for group communication in discussion forums, called '' channels'', but also allows one-on-one communication via private messages as well as chat an ...

shorthands,

emoticon An emoticon (, , rarely , ), short for "emotion icon", also known simply as an emote, is a pictorial representation of a facial expression using Character (symbol), characters—usually punctuation marks, numbers, and letters—to express a ...

phonetic spelling A phonemic orthography is an orthography (system for writing a language) in which the graphemes (written symbols) correspond to the phonemes (significant spoken sounds) of the language. Natural languages rarely have perfectly phonemic orthographi ...

and

slang Slang is vocabulary (words, phrases, and linguistic usages) of an informal register, common in spoken conversation but avoided in formal writing. It also sometimes refers to the language generally exclusive to the members of particular in-gro ...

. It is a

polysemic Polysemy ( or ; ) is the capacity for a sign (e.g. a symbol, a morpheme, a word, or a phrase) to have multiple related meanings. For example, a word can have several word senses. Polysemy is distinct from ''monosemy'', where a word has a single ...

multi-layered language that remixes the basic structure of English and computer code through the manipulation of

syllable A syllable is a unit of organization for a sequence of speech sounds typically made up of a syllable nucleus (most often a vowel) with optional initial and final margins (typically, consonants). Syllables are often considered the phonological "bu ...

s and

morpheme A morpheme is the smallest meaningful Constituent (linguistics), constituent of a linguistic expression. The field of linguistics, linguistic study dedicated to morphemes is called morphology (linguistics), morphology. In English, morphemes are ...

s. Like the related Codework of

Jodi Jodi is a feminine given name which may refer to: People * Jodi Albert (born 1983), English actress * Jodi Anasta (born 1985), Australian actress and model * Jodi Anderson (born 1957), American heptathlete * Jodi Appelbaum-Steinbauer (born 1956) ...

, Netochka Nezvanova, Ted Warnell, Alan Sondheim and lo_y, it bears some resemblance to hacker cultural 1337 / leet speak and Perl poetry. Through its semantic and syntactical layering, mezangelle achieves an aesthetic effect of altering words and letters from discrete, digital units into fluid, quasi-analog information. This fluidity and flow corresponds to its artistic use in email postings.

Author

Mez works under a multitude of assumed virtual identities or

avatar Avatar (, ; ), is a concept within Hinduism that in Sanskrit literally means "descent". It signifies the material appearance or incarnation of a powerful deity, goddess or spirit on Earth. The relative verb to "alight, to make one's appearanc ...

s. These avatars are presented throughout the Internet as authors of electronic writing. Examples of these include: mez breeze, netwurker, data.h!.bleeder, ms post modemism, mezflesque.exe, Purrsonal Areah Netwurker and cortical_h cker. mez is best known for her Codework based on her self-invented language mezangelle which she publishes on mailing lists like _arc.hive_, Nettime, and netbehaviour. These work, or "wurks" as she calls them, have language play and identity swapping as a central element. Because of their dense poetical language, they are also acclaimed and influential in

Digital Poetry Digital poetry is a form of electronic literature, displaying a wide range of approaches to poetry, with a prominent and crucial use of computers. Digital poetry can be available in form of CD-ROM, DVD, as installations in art galleries, in cert ...

. As of May 2014, Mez is the only Digital Poet who's a non-USA citizen to have her comprehensive career archive (called "The Mez Breeze Papers") housed at

Duke University Duke University is a private research university in Durham, North Carolina. Founded by Methodists and Quakers in the present-day city of Trinity in 1838, the school moved to Durham in 1892. In 1924, tobacco and electric power industrialist James ...

, through their

David M. Rubenstein David Mark Rubenstein (born August 11, 1949) is an American billionaire businessman. A former government official and lawyer, he is a co-founder and co-chairman of the private equity firm The Carlyle Group,

History

1994–1996

mezangelle first appeared in late 1994 - early 1995 on MUDs, the web chat channel
Kajplats 305
Cybersite and

unix Unix (; trademarked as UNIX) is a family of multitasking, multiuser computer operating systems that derive from the original AT&T Unix, whose development started in 1969 at the Bell Labs research center by Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, and ot ...

based y-talk. These instances involved re-mixing random chat responses, y-talk and IRC conventions back to the participants. Chat members communicated with each other through text based dialogue using avatars to interact. Notable avatars from this time included Viking, Jester and mez's

screen names Screen name may refer to: * Stage name, pseudonyms used for film appearances * User (computing) A user is a person who utilizes a computer or network service. A user often has a user account and is identified to the system by a usernam ...

aeon and ms post modemism. The Wollongong World Women Online exhibition (1995,

University of Wollongong The University of Wollongong (abbreviated as UOW) is an Australian public research university located in the coastal city of Wollongong, New South Wales, approximately 80 kilometres south of Sydney. As of 2017, the university had an enrolment of ...

Online Gallery) was the first traditionally presented exhibition to showcase a web-based text version of the mezangelle work _Through Ah Strainer_. Other online exhibitions that included mezangelled works during this period: *''Disgruntled Book of Wizzdumb'': a collaborative work between mez and the

Brisbane Brisbane ( ) is the capital and most populous city of the states and territories of Australia, Australian state of Queensland, and the list of cities in Australia by population, third-most populous city in Australia and Oceania, with a populati ...

organization digitarts (1996). *''Cutting Spaces'': web based mezangelle in the Undercover Girl Project Norway (1996).

1997–2003

During 1997–2003 mezangelle utilized

mailing list A mailing list is a collection of names and addresses used by an individual or an organization to send material to multiple recipients. The term is often extended to include the people subscribed to such a list, so the group of subscribers is re ...

forums as a distributive medium with an emphasis on peer collaboration. The works evolved into two subgenres: netwurks and codewurks/codeworks. Both forms employed code and chat convention

mash-ups Mashup may refer to: * Mashup (culture), the rearrangement of spliced parts of musical pieces as part of a subculture * Mashup (education), combining various forms of data and media by a teacher or student in an instructional setting * Mashup (mus ...

, HTML code and scripting languages to manipulate poetic structures. Codeworks included text emulations of broken source code whereas netwurks present in multimedia web interfaces that incorporate several codeworks. An example of a codework is _Viro. Logic Condition] ng1.1_ http://cramer.plaintext.cc:70/essays/textviren_-_mez/textviren_mez.pdf and an example of a netwurk is _The data] !bleeding tex] ts_. In this period mezangelle shifted from a reliance on script kiddy/

hacker A hacker is a person skilled in information technology who uses their technical knowledge to achieve a goal or overcome an obstacle, within a computerized system by non-standard means. Though the term ''hacker'' has become associated in popu ...

influences to a refined interactive practice that explored aspects of fusing biological/physical and

online In computer technology and telecommunications, online indicates a state of connectivity and offline indicates a disconnected state. In modern terminology, this usually refers to an Internet connection, but (especially when expressed "on line" or ...

living. Recurring themes from 1996 onward include: gamer dynamics, social engineering, questioning conceptions of print-based and

electronic literature Electronic literature or digital literature is a genre of literature encompassing works created exclusively on and for digital devices, such as computers, tablets, and mobile phones. A work of electronic literature can be defined as "a constr ...

, play theory,

teledildonics Teledildonics (also known as cyberdildonics) is the name coined for virtual sex encounters using networked, electronic sex toys to mimic and extend human sexual interaction. The term became known after technology critic and writer Howard Rheingold ...

, viral imagery, and examinations of

post-modern Postmodernism is an intellectual stance or mode of discourseNuyen, A.T., 1992. The Role of Rhetorical Devices in Postmodernist Discourse. Philosophy & Rhetoric, pp.183–194. characterized by skepticism toward the " grand narratives" of moderni ...

feminist Feminism is a range of socio-political movements and ideologies that aim to define and establish the political, economic, personal, and social equality of the sexes. Feminism incorporates the position that society prioritizes the male po ...

neural net Artificial neural networks (ANNs), usually simply called neural networks (NNs) or neural nets, are computing systems inspired by the biological neural networks that constitute animal brains. An ANN is based on a collection of connected unit ...

, social change and technofetistic theories.

2003–2007

In this timeframe mezangelle distribution altered from dispersal via mailing lists to

social networking A social network is a social structure made up of a set of social actors (such as individuals or organizations), sets of dyadic ties, and other social interactions between actors. The social network perspective provides a set of methods for an ...

formats. The change occurred due to the growing repressive nature of the mailing list forums used, including extensive

censorship Censorship is the suppression of speech, public communication, or other information. This may be done on the basis that such material is considered objectionable, harmful, sensitive, or "inconvenient". Censorship can be conducted by governments ...

by list moderators

Julianne Pierce Julianne Pierce is an Australian new media artist, curator, art critic, writer, and arts administrator. She was a member of the groundbreaking group VNS Matrix. She went on to become a founding member of the Old Boys Network, another importan ...

from Recode, Ted Byfield/Geert Lovink from Nettime and Chris Chesher from the ::fibreculture:: list. The livejournal _cross.ova.ing] rm.blog.2.log_ created in July 2003 is the first recorded procedural net art blog. There are at least two other known mezangelled blogs currently authored by mez. One is _dis posable_ which uses

reappropriation In linguistics, reappropriation, reclamation, or resignification is the cultural process by which a group reclaims words or artifacts that were previously used in a way disparaging of that group. It is a specific form of a semantic change (i.e. ...

of the blog format and snapshot software to create clustered

poetic Poetry (derived from the Greek ''poiesis'', "making"), also called verse, is a form of literature that uses aesthetic and often rhythmic qualities of language − such as phonaesthetics, sound symbolism, and metre − to evoke meanings in a ...

meanings. These nodal poems are examples of a type of digital readymade and are to be read via a grid-like text and image composite structure. For example, the tag, title, and link sections are all reworked with poetic loadings and not constructed according to conventional weblog standards.

2007–2014

As well as maintaining mezangelle works via the livejournal blog, this creative period again shifts Mez's artistic emphasis to the use of

augmented reality Augmented reality (AR) is an interactive experience that combines the real world and computer-generated content. The content can span multiple sensory modalities, including visual, auditory, haptic, somatosensory and olfactory. AR can be de ...

mixed reality Mixed reality (MR) is a term used to describe the merging of a real-world environment and a computer-generated one. Physical and virtual objects may co-exist in mixed reality environments and interact in real time. Mixed reality is largely synony ...

virtual reality Virtual reality (VR) is a simulated experience that employs pose tracking and 3D near-eye displays to give the user an immersive feel of a virtual world. Applications of virtual reality include entertainment (particularly video games), educ ...

and mobile platforms. In 2008, mezangelle works manifested in mainstream games such as

World of Warcraft ''World of Warcraft'' (''WoW'') is a massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG) released in 2004 by Blizzard Entertainment. Set in the ''Warcraft'' fantasy universe, ''World of Warcraft'' takes place within the world of Azeroth ...

: "..."Twittermixed Litterature"...involves WoW characters toons"on the Bloodscalp Server standing in Ironforge n in-game location+ live remixing n_gamechat that occurs between players and guild/character names that rotate past.

In 2009, mezangelle began appearing in more mainstream projects, including being utilised as a script device in New Media Scotland's

alternate reality game An alternate reality game (ARG) is an interactive networked narrative that uses the real world as a platform and employs transmedia storytelling to deliver a story that may be altered by players' ideas or actions. The form is defined by inten ...

"Alt-Winning: A game of Love, War and Telepathy" and as part of the WoW: Emergent Media Phenomenon Exhibition as part of the 3rd Faction's /hug Project at the Laguna Art Museum, California (sponsored by

Blizzard Entertainment Blizzard Entertainment, Inc. is an American video game developer and publisher based in Irvine, California. A subsidiary of Activision Blizzard, the company was founded on February 8, 1991, under the name Silicon & Synapse, Inc. by three graduat ...

). From 2011 to 2014, Mezangelle featured in a set of virtual reality games and mobile apps such as The Dead Tower, #PRISOM, and #Carnivast. #PRISOM premièred at The 2013 International Symposium on Mixed and Augmented Reality on an Augmented Reality

Head-up display A head-up display, or heads-up display, also known as a HUD (), is any transparent display that presents data without requiring users to look away from their usual viewpoints. The origin of the name stems from a pilot being able to view informa ...

Unit.

Footnotes

References

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *{{cite web, url=http://www.dvara.net/hk/digital_code_and_literary_text.pdf, date=14 March 2002, title=Digital Code and Literary Text, author=Florian Cramer, accessdate=2014-07-07 *http://hypertext.rmit.edu.au/dac/papers/Strehovec.pdf (Code Poetry)

External links

mo(ve.men)tion
mez' website with mezangelle work that often originated in email/

Internet Relay Chat Internet Relay Chat (IRC) is a text-based chat system for instant messaging. IRC is designed for group communication in discussion forums, called ''channels'', but also allows one-on-one communication via private messages as well as chat and ...

exchanges
Twitterwurk Set
mez' completed a Twitter residency in July 2008 with New Media Scotland utilising mezangelle Artistic languages Constructed languages introduced in the 1990s