Writing

The 2015 NMWP Shortlist is out now: huzzah! And one of those projects that made the shortlist is our "I Work for the Web" Netprov: double huzzah [+ a corresponding deluge of gratuitous exclamation marks indicating as such]!!!! The fabbotastic Mark C. Marino had this to say about the shortlisting: Nice news: I Work for the Web was shortlisted for the New Media Writing Prize!

"I think poets in particular play a really important role in drawing attention to the way these technologies are evolving...Mez Breeze is maybe the most recognizable Glitch Poetics artist that I mention, in that her way of writing is a composite of code language (so algorithms or a written piece of code) and a poem.

"Using Shelley Jackson's 1995 hypertext work Patchwork Girl as the initial model for a form of cyberfemininity that operates through hybridity and excess, this article examines the legacies of "patchwork" digital femininity in the works of Mez Breeze and Stephanie Strickland. Written in the invented language ‪#mezangelle, Mez Breeze's works posit the feminine as fluid, flexible, always ‪#cyborgian, and always deeply bodily.

Swoony: that's the feel-good-term I'll use for being notified that one of my fav codeworks [or code poems, if you will] has just been published as part of a Special Issue cooked up by Cordite Poetry Review and The Lifted Brow [who'll publish their half in mid-October, which will feature textual remixes, visual illustrations, songs, and gamified versions of some of the poems that feature in the Cordite issue].

When Dan O'Bannon was writing the script for Alien, he wrote the character of Ripley to be strong and complex. He also originally imagined Ripley being male. When no actor was found who could portray the character as O'Bannon had imagined, Casting Director Mary Selway brought them a woman who had every quality they were looking for.