Mez Breeze

Mez Breeze crafts experimental storytelling, Virtual Reality Literature, VR sculptures + paintings, XR experiences, games, and other genre-defying output. In 1994, Mez first started using the World Wide Web to author digital works and she hasn’t slowed since. Current and past tinkerings include the Virtual Reality Adventure Perpetual Nomads, yakking about the rise of Augmented Reality at The Next Web, exhibiting with the Third Faction Collective at World of Warcraft: Emergent Media Phenomenon, and authoring A Place Called Ormalcy, a[n] XR Literature work.

In July 2019, Mez won the 2019 Marjorie C. Luesebrink Career Achievement Award which: “…honors a visionary artist and/or scholar who has brought excellence to the field of electronic literature and has inspired others to help create and build the field.” In November 2019, Mez’s Virtual Reality Microstories Series V[R]ignettes – previously titled A Million and Two – won the Queensland University of Technology’s Digital Literature Award. In January 2019, A Place Called Ormalcy was shortlisted for the 2018 If:book New Media Writing Prize. In early 2018, Mez partnered with Microsoft, Samsung and MasterpieceVR for their VR Influencers Sustainability Initiative where VR Artists were invited to design models using a Windows Mixed Reality Headset. Also in 2018, Mez’s Virtual Reality Literature Experience Our Cupidity Coda made the finals of the 2018 EX Experimental New Media Art Awards, while also making both the 2018 Opening Up Digital Fiction Writing Competition and the 2018 Queensland Literary Awards for Digital Literature Shortlists. In November 2017, This Golden Stance was showcased at the Las Ranetas International Festival of Virtual Reality (alongside the Oculus Story Studio produced Dear Angelica and Sony’s Snatch): as of May 2018, this VR Sculpture is now on official display at the Museum of Other Realities.

In 2016, Mez took up an invite from the digital arts organisation Rhizome to have work memorialized in their Net Art Anthology: in January 2019, this Anthology also launched in print book form. Her co-developed narrative game All the Delicate Duplicates has won multiple awards, including the 2015 Tumblr International Arts and Media Prize, 2016 Best Overall Game at the Game City Festival, and the 2017 Dundee Game Design Award in the Best Experimental Game Category. #PRISOM, Mez’s co-developed 2013 Augmented Reality Game was commissioned for the International Symposium on Mixed and Augmented Reality. Academic James O’Sullivan describes #PRISOM as: “…the digital equivalent of Orwell’s 1984“.

Mez’s projects are taught worldwide. Her works reside in Collections as diverse as The World Bank, Cornell’s Rose Goldsen Archive and the National Library of Australia. She is also in the process of developing a career archive with Duke University’s Curator Collection team: this archive is to be housed at the Rubenstein Rare Book and Manuscript Library.

Mez currently serves as an Advisor to the Mixed Augmented Reality Art Research Organisation, an Editorial Board Member of the Digital Journal Thresholds, a co-founder of the XR Artists Collective, and is a Senior Research Affiliate of the Humanities and Critical Code Studies Lab.