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\begin{document}


\title{mez, ,,Re(ad.htm``}

\author{Florian Cramer}

\date{May 18, 2002}

\maketitle


mez is the self-chosen shorthand of the Austrial net artist Mary Anne
Breeze. Since its beginning, Net.art organized itself around
international mailinglists such as Nettime and Rhizome. But many
net artists didn´t use mailinglists just to communicate about net art,
but as a net.artistic medium themselves. A popular tactics was to
intentionally spam mailinglists with seemingly unreadable clusters of
letter and number codes.

Mez comes from this tradition. Her entry ``Re(ad.htm´´ is a selection of
her mailinglist postings. As an example, I pick the first half of the
piece ``\_Viro.Logic Condition][ing][ 1.1\_´´:

\begin{verbatim}

_Viro.Logic Condition][ing][ 1.1_

[b:g:in]

::Art.hro][botic][scopic N.][in][ten][dos][tions::
1.[b.ranch outwards||seething
jam-jar curs][ed][ored
drenching s][creening][ounds]

::Neol][o.jism][ithic Rever][b][s.al][l][s::
2.[drink sever][al][ed
c u in he][l][avan
a c][yclops][hair b:cumming sane]

::Gig:a][h!][:cycling::
3.[alert & c.rash.ing
chrysa][s][li][ding!][s//via
code syrup & brooding symbols]


\end{verbatim}


What seems like an unreadable mess at first, turns out to be subtle and
dense if you read closer. The whole text borrows from conventions of
programming languages; it presents itself as a program with a title,
version number, main routine -- indicated with the line ``[b:g:in]´´ --
and several subroutines or objects (which, like in the programming
language Perl, are indicated with two double colons).  But the main
device are the square brackets which, like in Boolean search
expressions, denote that a text can be read in multiple ways. For
example, the title reads simultaneously as ``Virologic Condition´´,
``Virologic Conditioning´´, ``Logic Condition´´ and ``Logic
Conditioning´´. This technique reminds of the portmanteau words of Lewis
Carroll and James Joyce's ``Finnegans Wake´´, but is reinvented here in
the context of net culture and computer programming. 

As the four readings of the title tell already, this particular text is
about humans and machines and about a sickness condition of both. The
square bracket technique is used to keep the attributions ambiguous. For
example, the two words in the line


``::Art.hro][botic][scopic N.][in][ten][dos][tions::´´

can be read as ``arthroscopic´´ / ``art robotic´´ / ``Arthrobotic´´ /
``horoscopic´´ and ``Nintendos´´ / ``intentions´´ or ``DOS´´. So the
machine becomes arthritic, sick with human desease, and the human
body becomes infected with a computer virus; in the end, they recover by
``code syrup \& brooding symbols´´.


So mez has taken ASCII Art, as we can see it in the exhibition above,
and Net.art code spamming and refined it from pure visual patterns into
a rich semantical private language. She calls it mezangelle which
itself is a mez hybrid for her own name and the word ``to mangle´´.

But why did we accept and shortlist the piece as software art? In the
jury, we defined software art as algorithmic code and/or reflections of
cultural concepts of software. In my opinion, mez´ work fits both parts
of the definition. Since her square-bracketted expressions expand into
multiple meanings, they are executable, that is, a combinatory
sourcecode which generates output. But it's also a sophisticated
reflection of cultural concepts of software which rereads the coding
convetions of computer programming languages as semantical language
charged with gendered politics. It's imaginary software which executes
in the minds of computer-literate human readers, not unlike the Turing
Machine which was an imaginary piece of hardware. 

So one could put mez' work as well into the context of code poetry, like
the many poetry written in the programming language Perl in the early
1990s, which to the largest extent was also pseudo-code that didn't
actually execute on a machine. But while most of this classical code
poetry was kitschy haikus and highschool love poetry, mez succeeds in
rewriting code poetry into contemporary art in the best sense of the
word.



\end{document}
