Rot and Root

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Feb 22, 2002

Sometimes I wonder about what the world must be like for Mez. I've heard that it's rather warm in Australia, as opposed to my own cool corner of the states; warmth quickens decay, which is only after all the breaking down of the baroque fabrications of existence to its constituent nothingnesses. And this is what this artist examines most in her work: structure and its decay... that random little particle in the helix that slides the system across its own keys...

Mez's latest, _][ad][Dressed in a Skin C.ode_, at times seems to propose that the decay of a system (sometimes the system is the guts of computer memory; at times it is perception itself, reduced to strangely harmonic rollovers; sometimes, yes, it is language) is also its life, the vibrant force that breathes step into its inertia. This is nothing new in and of itself; analogues in contemporary poetry, cinema and visual art abound (the poet John M. Bennett's work is rife with a baroque fragmentation, sometimes tentacling out into absolute pure harmony between content and form by the use of a bizarre and biologically luminescent toilet-humor; lots of mud and shit in John's poems); but Mez is a writer of a quite different sort, who writes with flash as well as javascipt and html.

Flashwise, Mez is the rollOver queen. Never have I seen such a profound use of the rollover effect as I have seen in her works. In Maschine F][w][orked N.tentions vs Haggard Crirtical Mass, a wonderful specimen of Mez's current mengerie of rhizomatic soma, the user faces a powder-blue typographic painting. Roving across its serene glow with the mouse, the user soon discovers that this seemingly static work (an email header, actually, from Mez addressed to the Webartery and the Wryting lists) is porous; one's rove becomes along its surface a white hand, which means COME IN. The painting-header swings between the stationary rigidity of painting and sound (a jungle; some jungle deep within the piece is choking in vines; distorted animals crawl through its undergrowth...) as you waver over it. Finally, hitting the exact center of the button all this wild swinging is, a button like a doorbell to transformation, gridlines multiply across the words of the poem you can just begin to read....

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