Mezangelle

mezangelle is a poetic-artistic hybrid language developed by Australian-based Internet artist mez (Mary-Anne Breeze). Mezangelle mixes, often on the low level of syllables and morphemes, English, ASCII art, fragments from programming language source code, markup languages, regular expressions and wildcard patterns, protocol code, IRC shorthands, emoticons, phonetic spelling and slang. It is a polysemic, multi-layered language resembling the portmanteau words of Lewis Carroll and James Joyce. However, unlike the latter it is a technopoetic language which reflects the symbolic and physical interaction and overlapping of human-machine communication in the Internet. As such, it is widely recognized as a central contribution to Codework art. Like the related codework of jodi, Netochka Nezvanova (a.k.a. antiorp/integer), Ted Warnell, Alan Sondheim and lo_y, it bears some resemblance to hacker cultural 1337 / leet speak and Perl poetry, but is clearly more grounded in the artistic than in the technical community.

mezangelle has evolved since 1995 from artistic-experimental E-Mail communication on Internet art forums, including Nettime, syndicate, and webartery. Since mezangelle dissects and recombines language by stacking multiple layers of meanings into single words, it could be called hypertext on a morphological and grammatical level. As an informal language that derives much of its tension from incorporating formal code, it is not syntactically fixed, but in continuous artistic development.

External links

• mo(ve.men)tion, mez' website with mezangelle work that often originated in E-mail/Internet_Relay_Chat exchanges
• _arc.hive_, a mailing list for codework and mezangelle