TOSS - MEZ BREEZE

We’re still far from being fully aware of the software part of our daily reading and writing practice. Beyond the invisible programming code and its mechanisms, we’re blindly agreeing on the infamous « Terms and Services » every time we install or start to use a software. Mez Breeze is a celebrated net.artist combining language, software and networks as a single complex tool writing pieces in her own hybrid language, called « mezangelle ». In ToSS (meaning « Terms of Service Static ») she’s using extracts from several Terms and Conditions/Terms and Services of corporate-based digital data gatekeepers to create a literary piece in the same form, but sarcastically describing the boundaries set to use an imaginary software called « FacePalm ». The text progress describing those boundaries in a sophisticated harassment of the user, expressed intersecting and declining words and punctuation, with a progressively emerging sense of familiarity and uneasiness. In fact the demolition of any kind of privacy and the estreme power of data retention is flowing between the lines. The text is published on Pastebin, a tool used to publicly share chunks of programming code, so the piece becomes a vigorous political gesture, perfectly embedding form and (digital) function.

« Not since the work of James Joyce has any one person so creatively explored layers upon layers of dimensional linguistic meaning as the writer/artist Mez Breeze » (Séamas Cain at the 2012 International Conference of ICIS). The impact of Mez’s unique « codewurks » has been equated with that of Shakespeare, James Joyce, Emily Dickinson, and Larry Wall. Her awards include the 2001 VIF Prize [Germany], the JavaMuseum Artist Of The Year 2001 [Germany], 2002 Newcastle New Media Poetry Prize [Australia], winner of the 2006 Site Specific Index Page Competition [Italy] and Burton Wonderland Gallery Co-Winner 2010 [judged by Tim Burton]. Mez was also a Vilém Flusser Theory Award 2011 nominee for her article set « Social Tesseracting », and was co-nominated in the graphics category (for the synthetic reality game #PRISOM) in the 2013 Digital Humanities Awards. Mez is also the Creative Director of @MezBreezeDesign, an Augmented Reality Scholar and Technology and Culture Journalist.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mez_Breeze