[Nettime-bold] Yes, but is it art?

["self re:][ply.cator][" <netwurker@hotkey.net.au>]

http://www.thecouriermail.news.com.au/common/story_page/0,5936,3909023%255E7642,00.html

Yes, but is it art?
Cath Hart
08mar02

IS AUSTRALIA behind the times when it comes to accepting new forms of art 
on the Net?

Cyberpoet Mez (Mary-Anne Breeze) has been banned from the e-mail list, 
Fibreculture, on the ground that her work is art-spam – postings that clog 
up the system.

According to the list administrator, Chris Chesher, Mez's work doesn't 
contribute to the themes of the list. Chesher, a lecturer at the University 
of New South Wales, says the themes of Fibreculture are new media policy, 
education, artistic practice and theory. And posts by Net artist Mez don't 
fit the bill.

Some of the other facilitators had experience of other lists where Mez had 
been posting and had contributed to what they perceived to be a 
deterioration of the culture of the list, he says. Mez has been banned from 
two other e-mail lists in recent years – resistant.media and :::recode::: – 
for similar reasons.

But this so-called art-spam has been Mez's ticket to international 
recognition. "Overseas I'm a pioneer of Net art," she says. "Most people 
recognise me and invite me to conferences to speak, but in Australia I've 
been received, I wouldn't say poorly, but certain institutions (have) gone 
'You're annoying, you're not fitting in to how we construct our arts scene'. "

Internationally her work has been short-listed for the 2001 Electronic 
Literature Organisation's Fiction Prize, appeared on the C-Theory website 
and a conference paper devoted to her, The Internet Poetry of Mez, was 
delivered to the 2001 Modern Language Association International Conference.

She creates fictional texts using a language she calls Mezangelle, which 
involves inserting syllables, letters and symbols into words to "create 
different layers of meaning or a different loading (that) will take you to 
a meaning place that is somewhere else, like a hyperlink would," the 
31-year-old says.

"I'll create an e-mail text that mimics e-mail conventions themselves, and 
then I'll send that out on to different mailing lists.

"I've kind of hijacked the communications avenues in a way," she says, and 
that can cause a bit of controversy because a lot of people don't want that 
in their inbox.

 For a time, Griffith University academic and poet Komninos Zervos didn't 
want her posts in his inbox.

"They initially appear like a scramble of symbols and text," he says. "She 
wasn't my cup of tea, but I had the right to hit the delete button so it 
didn't bother me.

"And for a long time I did hit the delete button, until I took the trouble 
to read them, and now I read them quite easily."

Zervos now says she is shaping a new direction for poetry and is one of the 
few Australian writers who has made an impact overseas.

But Chesher thinks Mez's methods of exhibition and distribution are 
inappropriate.

"In my building, on one side of the hall there are tutorial rooms, says 
Chesher, "on the other side of the hall there are theatre spaces. And it is 
appropriate to do performance art in the theatre spaces and not in the 
tutorial rooms.

"I guess that part of the role of artists is to subvert some of those 
spatial categories, but I guess part of the role of facilitators is to say, 
'Don't do it'. "
© Queensland Newspapers


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