Gallery Entry
Flay The Finish
By Mez Breeze · AU
"Flay the Finish" is an eight-part interactive poem about online bigotry and misinformation surrounding gender identity, appearance and ageing. Its written core is Mezangelle, the code-poetic language I have developed and written in since the 1990s. Brackets, embedded letterforms and substitutions allow several readings to inhabit the same word at once, so language refuses to settle into a single authoritative meaning. The poem is experienced through a browser rather than on a fixed page with each section pairing its text with a portrait. Tapping the poem removes and restores its bracketed Mezangelle elements, changing what can be read: dragging or tracing across the portrait disturbs a younger colour image and exposes an older monochrome counterpart underneath. So in this interactive poem reading therefore becomes an act of touching, revealing, withholding and recombining. "Flay the Finish" grew from my interest in the ways network culture turns bodies and identities into surfaces for rapid judgement, and the gestures involved are deliberately ordinary: touching a screen, inspecting an image, toggling information, moving quickly from one fragment to another - here those familiar gestures become consequential. The reader is not outside the poem but implicated in what becomes visible and what disappears. AI-assisted processes were used in developing visual material and in coding assistance, but the writing, concept and artistic logic of the work is all human-made [ie by me]. The text and Mezangelle are my own: I devised the narrative structure, chose and directed the imagery, determined the relationships between younger and older portraits, designed the interactions, selected and rejected generated material, edited the resulting assets and made the final aesthetic and structural decisions. This relationship between human authorship and computational assistance is central to the work rather than incidental to it: "Flay the Finish" does not ask whether a machine can produce an image or a line of code. It instead asks what a human writer does with those systems once they become part of the conditions in which language, identity and bodies are encountered. The machine can assist in constructing the surface, but meaning only emerges through the choices that shape it and through another human being’s act of reading.
- Category
- WRITING
- Approved
- 13 October 2026
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