[spectre] Rot and Root

[Seizu][o][r][d][e][r][]

Rot and Root
by Lewis Lacook

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 Critical 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....

Mez's work is, at its textual base, indebted to the old concretists and 
constructivists; it's at text-level visual poetry, and yet when multimedia 
like flash and dhtml gets thrown into the mix, something miraculous 
happens. Mez is primarily a writer, but a writer with a clear idea of the 
very core of interactive media--this work is a whole; it is not simply text 
transfigured with pretty pictures, be they moving to sound or no. Mez 
sculpts in these new media. She constructs a hypertext much like Joyce must 
have constructed Finnegan's Wake. There are, in her language, certain 
resonances that carry themselves from the bounds of the page into the 
quickness of motion and the ambiance of noise.



[@ suite 101
http://www.suite101.com/article.cfm/15239/89610 ]



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www.cddc.vt.edu/host/netwurker/
www.hotkey.net.au/~netwurker
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