web art

“Internal Damage Data” uses the structure of a multiple choice questionnaire for self assessment of internal damage to shape the first part of the poem. For each question, Mez uses option C (maybe, unsure, other…) to develop her poem, seeking to transcend the traditional yes/no binaries in such questionnaires. In the part depicted above, she uses algorithms to structure her poem: using the logic and language of programming to guide the reader’s experience of the poem.

[From the "I Love EPoetry" “Internal Damage Data” and “Fleshis.tics” by Mez Breeze Entry.]

"How I Loved the Broken Things of Rome" pieces together fragments of history, poetry, video, photography and cartography collected during an extended stay in Rome. This work reflects upon certain gaps - between the fragment and the whole, between the local and the tourist, between what is known of history and what is speculative. Rome is among the largest and oldest continuously occupied archaeological sites in the world. Daily life is complicated, even for the locals. Everything is running late, circuitous, or quasi-rotto. Romanticism and pragmatism must coexist. My struggles with slang, schedules, and social vagaries reminded me acutely of when I first moved to Montréal. Understanding what's going on around me now seems to be less a question of the acquisition of language than one of overcoming the dislocation of being a stranger. In her poem The Fall of Rome: A Traveller's Guide Montréal poet Anne Carson writes: "A stranger is someone desperate for conversation." I certainly found that to be the case. There were days in Rome that I did not, could not, speak to anyone. Oxford Archaeological Guide and cameras in tow, I tried to capture something of the impossibly elusive and fragmentary nature of language amid Rome's broken columns, headless statues and other, often unidentifiable, ruins.

How I Loved the Broken Things of Rome was produced in residency at OBORO’s New Media Lab with the financial support of the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec.

Web-art work that focus on the poetics of alterity – the game of identity and alterity. Based on interactors’ data (skin color, name, city, country, gender, height and weight) the work creates different visual kaleidoscopes intending to cause reflection about people’s differences and similarities.

(Source: Artist's site)

The artist also produced a version of the work for Second Life, where the kaleidoscope is formed by the leaves of a tree. Each avatar who interacts creates a leaf with his/her skin color and each 10 leaves created causes the tree to produce a coin of L$ 1,00, which can be taken by any avatar who touches it.

Roman Jakobson defined the poetic function of language as being governed by principles of selection and order. Under this vision the poet is in charge of selecting and organising words in a particular way in order to achieve a poetic effect.ACITEOP is a programme that groups together different experimental tools used for constructing poetic narratives, both textual and visual, through the deconstruction of the poetic function of language using different algorithms.The result, which is different with each reading or interaction, is both a deconstructed text and a brand new piece of work generated from that same process of deconstruction.This first version is a simple example of the programme that creates a narrative based on text, sound and images, which begins with the deconstruction of the poem "Between What I See and What I Say" by Octavio Paz, who dedicated the poem to the Russian linguist Roman Jakobson after his death.