Zones Autonomes Mutantistes (Maz)

"Walter Van Der Mäntzche placed signs in various public spaces, documenting them in photos. The project's name Mutantist Autonomous Zone (MAZ or ZAM in French) refers to anarchist writer Hakim Bey's T.A.Z.: Temporary Autonomous Zone[ . . . ] and combines Bey's theory with work from the collectively-authored Manifeste mutantiste (Mutantist Manifesto). The original publication of ZAM is accompanied by a theoretical text on the Mutantisme blog which further engages with Bey's ideas from 'Manifesto of Poetic Terrorism.' MAZ puts in to [sic] practice Bey's philosophy of public street art protest: 'Grafitti-art loaned some grace to ugly subways & rigid public monuments - Poetic Terrorist art can also be created for public places: poems scrawled in courthouse lavatories, small fetishes abandoned in parks & restaurants, xerox-art under windshield-wipers of parked cars, Big Character Slogans pasted on playground walls. . . . ' MAZ recalls textual street projects such as Truisms (Jenny Holzer), Bubble Project (Ji Lee), Implementation (Nick Montfort and Scott Rettberg), and Logozoa (Robert Kendall). While the focus of Renderings is the translation of computational writing into English, MAZ was included as an interesting exception, one in which the language of the original work—although not deeply worked on by computation—is situated in particular physical spaces, and on a blog, and needs to be not only translated but 'reimplemented' in some other unusual ways. The signs have been translated to English by Patsy Baudoin and Nick Montfort." -- From Electronic Literature Collection, Volume 3