and media scholar N. Katherine Hayles considers Mencía's work at the intersection of human and nonhuman through media transformation. Within the history of literacy, Hayles takes Mencía's work as an exploration of the disassociation of sound from a stable textual referent in a digital environment. Hayles thus sees Mencía's work as transcending electronic literature as a literary form to offer insight into the "media transformations and the conditions that make literacy possible." Media scholarChristopher Funkhouser, in tracing the evolution of digital poetry, has considered Mencía's work to be "inventing a new media language" through her innovative use of images and sound, much in the tradition of intermedia. Mencía’s 2001 project ‘’Another Kind of Language’’ has been interpreted as a commentary on linguistic imperialism in the 21st century, juxtaposing and destabilizing Global English with Mandarin Chinese and Arabic. Hypermedia artist/writer Talan Memmott describes the project as an example of "signifying harmonics," and discusses the ways in which the project's transfer from installation piece to Web project diminishes the original auditory experience of the interweaving of the three languages. Mencía’s Birds Singing Other Birds’ Songs, an interactive experience in which images of birds fly across the screen at the user's prompting, singing human-generated bird calls with the corresponding onomatopoeias written on the bird, has generated significant scholarly and popular attention. Media critic Scott Rettberg conceives of the project, with its abstract use of language, within the tradition of 20th century avant-garde movements, especially Dadasound poetry, rejecting what he sees as the common focus on novelty in electronic literature. Media scholar and archeologist Lori Emerson sees the project as a comment on the translation process, from bird to human languages and back. In her emphasis on electronic literature, Emerson criticizes Birds Singing Other Birds’ Songs for not taking full advantage of the digital medium as an essential component of the message of the piece. In contrast to Emerson, Hayles considers how the project plays with various forms of cognition via the creation of hybrid beings where the human and nonhuman come together to create a new way of knowing. Additionally, Hayles describes Birds as "a reenactment of the history of literacy" in its move from sound to writing to pictorial iconography. Mencía’s choice of birds as the subject of her work has even been interpreted within the long literary tradition of bird representations as a reflection on the distortion and recreation of orality and the transformation of iconography from human code into bird's code.
