Mez Breeze – I ❤️ E-Poetry

“_:terror(aw)ed patches:_” by Mez Breeze and Shane Hinton

April 20, 2013 by Leonardo Flores

This collaborative work created in the now-defunct Google Wave is documented as a video which shows writing at different stages scrolling up the screen. Each screen-captured image scrolls upwards at a speed that allows readers to apprehend most of the work— less if you’re unfamiliar with mezangelle— visually enacting the wave metaphor. The music for this piece, “Something Happened When You Were Born” by minusbaby, contributes to a sense of collaborative building through its aural structure, visualized below.

This is a screenshot of the waves described in the text below. Their color is blue.

Judging by the shape of the sound waves (get it?), this instrumental piece has a relatively simple structure: a slow crescendo in volume and electronica elements (lasting about 2:30 minutes) with a shorter (about 1:00 minute) diminuendo. This structure can be mapped with the visual collaboration we can see in the waves of Wave interactions, mirroring the intensification of interactions between Breeze and Hinton as they shape their work and a reduction of activity as they tweak it into final form. Would we be able to visualize the interaction if they simply published the final version as a printable text?

“Real_Time_”1sts!” [or: PanoptiConned Imagery From the Scene]” by Mez Breeze

April 19, 2013 by Leonardo Flores

This work is inspired by the real-time events triggered by a fatal shooting incident in MIT and a manhunt for suspects allegedly involved in the Boston Marathon bombings as reported through social media, particularly Twitter. (Here’s a link describing the situation as I write this entry, followed by a snapshot of the #Watertown hashtag in Twitter. It is 6:00 am EST).

“Feral C” by Mez Breeze

March 15, 2013 by Leonardo Flores

Open “Feral C” by Mez Breeze

This work is a series of live Twitter performances of characters, each of which has an account and interacts in this social network to form what Breeze describes as a “socumentary.”

“A “socumentary” is an entertainment form that merges Choose Your Own Adventure /Alternate Reality Drama/Social Game and Social Networking conventions. The result is a type of synthetic mockumentary that exists entirely within social media formats.

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“#OutsideUrDoor” by Mez Breeze

March 14, 2013 by Leonardo Flores

This performance piece ran live on Twitter on from 9:30 to 9:45 pm on October 31, 2010 under the (now empty) hashtag #outsideurdoor. This hashtag pulled together performances from three Twitter characters: a zombie called @MrShamble, a werewolf called @vvolfmaan, and a vampire named @Nozfera2, all of whom seemed to be preparing to enter the Inspace Gallery, or reader’s house, and #attackthehumaninside. Mez describes this performance as follows:

exhibited via a Live Trans-Reality Performance Event held simutaneously via Twitter streams, The Web, and geophysically at the Inspace Gallery as part of Inspace’s “No One Can Hear You Scream”/The Third International Conference on Interactive Digital Storytelling: “…the knitting 2gether of the #OutsideUrDoor synthetic/real-time action created through the @MrShamble, @Nozfera2 and @vvolfmaan characters via multiple projections/soundtrack/linked c[l]ues with geophysical audience participation [and those exclusively in the twittersphere] was marvellous. the [micro in more than 1 sense] narrative gradually unfolding in front of a live audience based in Scotland…just…mixed reality ftw:)…this type of net-native work[ing] really extends + [weirdly] collapses so many conventions/distinctions.”

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“Twitterwurking” by Mez Breeze

March 13, 2013 by Leonardo Flores

This guest performance in the New Media Scotland Twitter account during her residency in July 2008 featured a daily tweet for each day of the month— making a sequence of 31 silky lines mezangelle.

_Twitterwurking_comprised of sequential “tweets” posted via a microblogging platform called Twitter. The work itself was written in my mezangelle language- a type of merging of programming languages/code with poetic elements. The Twitterwurk sought to incorporate specific users into the narrative by typing the “@” symbol before their name. The users were then made aware of this focused reply and thus deliberately enfolded into the tweetstream/project.

“the data][h!][bleeding texts” by Mez Breeze

November 12, 2012 by Leonardo Flores

This multimedia poem gives a voice to a body and mind imagined through computational conditions. Mary Anne Breeze / Mez / Netwurker has developed a language practice known as mezangelle, which she uses in this poem to create a cyborg lyric voice. The implied metaphor in the title is that data has a body and it is bleeding, perhaps it has been wounded. Mapped onto electronic texts, the displayed texts are the skin, while the code is the rest of the body, including the blood. What we read is a combination of computer and natural languages, both of which are executable.

“Internal Damage Data” and “Fleshis.tics” by Mez Breeze

October 14, 2012 by Leonardo Flores

Screen capture of "Internal Damage Data" by Mez Breeze. Black text on red background. Text: "OptiON: Compare and Assess Internal Datadamage / OptiON: Explicit / [DE]Func[fix]tion Is Loaded(By Internal Damage Form As Narrative String) As Absorbed by Read.her / 1 Returns True if the specifi[X]ed Internal Damage Form accepter as Read.her Damage Coll[ate]usion view. / ConstFIXtional damageStateClosed = 0 / ConstFixtional damageDesignOpen = 1 / If DisbeliefSeepageCmd(acSepCmdGetdamageState, acForm, strNarrative) <> condamageStateClosed / Then" — Open “Internal Damage Data” and “Fleshis.tics” by Mez Breeze

These two brief hypertext poems appear as items 3 and 4 in the list of featured works by Mary Anne Breeze (best known for her nom d’ordinateur, Mez) inCauldron & Net, Volume 2. These works exemplify two other aspects of her poetic practice: an interest in the body, particularly as meshed with programming, which she also uses to shape her works.

“The Dead Tower” by Andy Campbell and Mez Breeze

July 17, 2012 by Leonardo Flores

This narrative poem is arranged on a darkly atmospheric virtual world designed to both creep you out and pull you in through curiosity. Like the proverbial moth, the reader’s attention is drawn towards the brightest things around: white words float in the air, static or rotating. And the lines of mezangelle verse both heighten the dread by telling fragments of a ghostly narrative prefigured by the bus crash site the reader finds herself in and soften the tone with hints about the interface that nudge the fourth wall.