Jury's statements on MEZ [Mary-Anne Breeze] 's _ID.xorcism_
Tatiana Bazzichelli.
Mez’s _ID.xorcism_, written in her by now famous "mezangelle" language shows us one more time the possibility to use the Net as a non-linear reading tool and that coding can be artistically and culturally oriented, through its creative re-interpretation.
In _ID.Xorcism_ it's evident the changing idea from a frontal artistic representation to a fluid one.
_ID.Xorcism_ is a project that flows in front of us, and we have to run after it without the possibility to "own it", a rapid creative flux that goes beyond, "passes us", exactly when we try to stop it to understand it.
A seductive game made of many multiple cyborgs.
_ID.Xorcism_ is a playful experiment too. It’s about the idea of the identity as fixed, unique and unchanging, that is neutralized (Identity.eXorcism?) in many other possible ways of appearing, more fluid and displaced, more sensuous, slippery and mirror of our time.
_ID.Xorcism_ is also an ironic and critic answer to the competition and a perfect hack of site specific’s concept.
_ID.Xorcism_ shows us how creative on-line work in the Net necessarily exceeds the idea of static nature, becoming as multiple as our many possible identities.
(ID+SiteSpecific).xorcism = [IDs.in.flow]...>>>
Domenico Quaranta. _ID.xorcism_, of the Australian artist Mary-Anne Breeze, is only apparently a simple work.
It is an horizontal-flowing poem that is composed by text and image and it has no hypertextual link.
In this way the work is defined in one single page. It seems like a vsiting card, or an autopresentation tag.
But the identitarian reflection is only apparent: the Artist’s identity is not revealed but rather exorcised, as the title explains us.
The text flows over and under the images, on two horizontal bands. The relation isn’t always of clear comprehension but the impression is that the text below gives a footnote to the related "verses" of the band above it and to the images: now a deepening, now an ironic comment, ow an interpretation’s attempt.
As usual in MEZ’s work, images refer to a cyber esthetic that is a little bit out of fashion and, however, the global page style seems to be linked to a Net’s tectonic band that can be considered as buried long time ago.
It’s as taking cognizance of our hybrid identity that expresses itself ironically with the visual languages of a distopia of the fusion man/machine.
This fusion has already shown all its limits but it has realized in a completely different way from what it was expected to.
The "heart" of the work is without any kind of doubt the text, which totally absence of interactivity we can focus on.
Teh Australian artist is one of the "code poetry" pioneers. "Code poetry" is a way of poetical componement in which the informatic code is mixed with our natural language.
The result is a hybrid language that in its authors’ opinion is the most adeguate to transmit the hybrid condition we live in.
MEZ gave to this net-art movement a great contribution with the invention of the "mezangelle", an idiomatic language that conjugates abbreviations, phonetic sobstitutions and other net- communication’s typical forms with syntactical elements coming from the HTML code and from other informatic languages as Perl.
The result is a continuous short-circuit between human and machine language, between text’s legibility and code’s feasibility, between sense and process.
A language that could seem – maybe, in a first moment – of difficult decodification but – sooner or later – our cyborg nature [built of human knots of a computer’s net] gives us the key of it.
Finally, MEZ’s work is intimately linked to the Net and to our "netizenship" (that is verified here in a linguistical level).
This work can be considered as intimately site-specific, because it succeeds in conjugating the conceptual and esthetic quality with the competition’s sense.
Corrado Mora.
In _ID.xorcism_ and generally in MEZ’s code poetry I was mostly impressed by the original and developed interpretative interaction’s level created inside the work.
There is not only the reader’s interpretation. There’s also a continuous interlacement made of meanings and cross references inside single words as well as into the connection between more words, different verses, flowing-bands and – finally – words and images.
MEZ developed a contemporary "lingua franca" built of daily language and programming codes.
MEZ succeeds in giving to her work original esthetic and conceptual valences and with her work she is able to communicate a deep poetic content.
