Exhibited at gallery or event

"The Dancing Rhinoceri of Bangladesh" is described as "an interactive poem with a strong message" and "a surrealist poem." Niss states that her goal was "to make a textually-based work that uses techniques other than ordinary hypertext. So instead of clicking to get to a new part of the poem, all the text is presented on the screen at once. The content is revealed by mousing over a word which highlights words scattered across the field which combine to form a sentence."--From Furtherfield

"'Portal' is an interactive net.dance in three parts that follows a traveler passing from the physical world to a virtual world called the Sunset/Sunrise. The work touches on the spatial and aesthetic relationship between virtual and physical spaces, as well as the relationship between user and digital content. Cinematic and kinetic, the traveler uses dance as the main mode of communication and means to travel between worlds. This ambiguity between the real and unreal is reflected in the content: analog footage is mixed with digital resolutions as the figure moves from a New York City street to a digitally created desert landscape. Traditional dance film techniques, as seen in kinesthetic editing and image creation, are combined with interactivity and screen design."--From Turbulence

"A work between reality and fantasy, where the Brazilian Regina Célia Pinto offers an interpretation of Lewis Carroll's world from the perspective of the balcony of her house, a metaphor for the artist's own life." -- El País, April 21st, 2005 (auto-translated).

In every step of this interactive game-poem find the point-and-click trigger, to make the dialogue evolve. The game consists of approximately forty screens/events, which you may read or explore until you get to the end. Some times you may be asked to write down an intimate thought. All answers typed and submitted by players are collected to create a collective think-tank of the overall game experience.

The proposed work is an ode to the struggles of human communication. It reflects on the hardships of unfortunate dialogues, the splendor of reaching to the other side, the rise and fall of human connectedness, the agonies of stray meanings and words. Expressed through the poetics of weather phenomena, this conceptually driven interactive work represents the mental landscape between two lovers, a parallel metaphor for the contemporary digitally mediated condition. Early cyberspatial theories referred to an erotic ontology of digital experience. Michael Heim described the platonic dimensions of an augmented Eros. Roland Barthes on the other hand described language as the skin with which we struggle to touch the 'other'. In this game-poem, senses, meanings and ideas appear to be all permeated by the ‘spell’ of technology, a rhetorical as well as an erotic act of mediation through different worlds. The reader/player is asked to become part of the dipole, to meander through poetic texts and tormented emotions, at times linear, other times bifurcating, while exploring a dialogue ‘atmosphere’ inspired by visual poetry. Endeavoring to reach the 'other side' through the use of spoken language, this piece of work is an affective journey to the tempests of a fallen dialogue.

This poetic experience uses Twine and operates like a hypertext choose-your-own-adventure. The player must navigate a map to unlock clues about the nature of the landscape - a process called "medicating." Throughout this hellish roadtrip, the player's navigation depends on choices in cardinal directions, character interactions and even dictionary definitions. This work was created as one half of my graduate thesis. Collectively, the work on the page and the hypertext poem is known as Educational Materials for Mostly Mitigated Maidens. I completed this graduate program in 2019, obtaining a Masters in poetry. Since then, I spend my time writing, exploring other digital spaces, and teaching college composition at Solano Community College. Here is the link to Directional Pilgrim. It will launch in your browser and, for the full experience, requires speakers or headphones. Use the mouse to click and point - no other buttons are required. Google Chrome is recommended browser.

Utopia is a state which allows for a certain amount of resolution - a period or space which exists in equilibrium. Dystopia, then, is a state in which nothing can be resolved. A solution is needed, but every effort to balance opposing forces results in a renewal of already overbearing systems in control. To me, it is this repetition of effort that characterizes a dystopia. Landscape comes as an afterthought, and can take many forms. In 2018, fires ravaged the state of California. This was the space that I began my work in. Although the natural world around me expanded in all directions, the feeling was one of claustrophobia. Our yearly cycle revolves around our wildfire season - there is no way to avoid it, and each year it gets worse. This, coupled with my own anxieties surrounding mental health and addition, inspired the dystopian space of Directional Pilgrim. Just as medieval pilgrims circled Jerusalem, hitting holy waystations and reading (and therefore reenacting) the Bible passages relevant to the particular place, so does the player as pilgrim revisit the passages in this apocalyptic landscape. By redoing (and often repeating) these experiences, the player may come to find meaning in the journey itself - even though the resolution to the narrative remains elusive.

Big Data is a term used to describe, in general, the gathering of vast amounts of digital information and its subsequent processing, through sophisticated computational techniques, with the purpose of obtaining knowledge. In the case of Big Data, the poem, the term refers to the massive collection of personal information communicated online and its processing for commercial purposes, especially for-profit endeavors related to a persuasion achieved through the detailed knowledge of individuals, a persuasion aimed to be invisible. The poem is not situated in the present but in the near future, when the collection of personal information will be achieved by individual activities online, by the contributions carried out by other people and by sensors that are part of the Internet of things. The personal data, aggregated, will be processed at very high speeds with the assistance of artificial intelligence. The combination between the massive collection of personal data and its subsequent statistical processing, with that emphasis on inferential statistics to achieve persuasive objectives, will lead to a terrible reality. In general, the logic of statistics will be used to define human existence individually and socially in a deterministic way. Big Data's resulting knowledge, the poem suggests, is equivalent to the omniscience generally attributed to deities.

While the advertising industry heralds the use of digital communication technologies as a form of individual empowerment and self-efficacy, people’s interactions with their devices are proving to also have significant negative effects on society. The poem is situated in the near future, when the collection of personal information will be achieved by individual activities online, by the contributions carried out by other people, and through sensors that are part of the Internet of Things. The personal data, aggregated, will be processed at very high speeds with the assistance of artificial intelligence. As it happens in this generative video poem, unique pieces of audiovisual media will be created on-the-fly to achieve persuasive objectives based on individual profiles. The combination between the massive collection of personal data and its subsequent statistical processing, aimed at achieving persuasive objectives, will push us towards a terrible reality. Ultimately, the logic of statistics will be used to define human existence individually and socially in a deterministic way and, unfortunately, it will be guided mostly by commercial interests.

NTERTWINGLING is a work for the web and for live performance, which involves hypertext and improvised music. The hypertexts are very diverse and include aphorisms, parodies, poems, fragments of narratives, and quotations. These are connected by hyperlinks, which allow the screener to take many different pathways through the work, so each screening will be different (and not all will include every text). In a live performance, the improvising musicians must respond to the hypertexts sonically, but they can do so in any way they choose. The hypertexts were written and visually designed by Hazel Smith, with image backgrounds supplied by Roger Dean. The sound is taken from a live performance of the work, given in December 1998 at the Performance Space, Sydney, which involved extensive digital processing of electronic and acoustic sound, played by the austraLYSIS Electroband (Roger Dean, Sandy Evans, and Greg White). The recorded sound has been slightly edited, and is presented playing both forwards and backwards, in streaming audio. Intertwingling is a word used by T.H. Nelson (one of the pioneers of hypertext theory and practice) to describe the process in hypertext whereby everything interweaves and intermingles with everything else. It conveys the way the piece "intertwingles" different media, different types of text, and different kinds of subject matter (travel, place, desire, economics and ideas about narrative).

The egg, the cart, the horse, the chicken was written by Hazel Smith (text) and Roger Dean (sound). The hypertext and animations, written in Flash by Hazel Smith, are designed for a split screen. The texts in both the upper and lower frame are grouped into short linear 'scenes' which form an overall 'movie'. But the sequence in the upper frame can be disrupted by clicking on hyperlinks (marked in capital letters), which allow the reader to jump to texts other than the ones which follow each other in sequence. Consequently the juxtaposition of the texts on the two different screens is also variable. The piece engages with the way in which linear systems are constantly disrupted by non-linearity. This is written into the piece at a formal level by the use of the hyperlinks, animation and split screen, which tend to disrupt normal reading processes. Thematically the piece also addresses the ways in which a simple cause and effect relationship rarely operates, even within scientific systems. At the same time the hypertextual network interconnects many different ideas including the cultural significance of illness, the process of writing, the commodification of women's bodies, and the atemporal nature of memory.

The soundtrack, is an algorithmic piece Ligating for computer controlled keyboard sounds (2000). This sound piece is one of minimalist rhythmic complexity. The mesmeric 11 note cycle of the outset gradually evolves in pitch content, speed, and density of accompaniment. At a certain point when the pattern has become very fast, its rhythmic content changes quite dramatically. At this point the piece climbs to its conclusion; which turns out to be reversible, as the piece then plays backwards. The work was entirely written in MAX, the algorithmic composition and performance MIDI/sound control platform, so that performances vary, but this is a quicktime recording of one realisation, now fixed, for use with this web piece.

See Hazel Smith and Roger Dean 'The egg the cart the horse the chicken: cyberwriting, sound, intermedia'Interactive Multimedia Electronic Journal of Computer-Enhanced Learning. Vol. 4. No. 1.  https://www.learntechlib.org/j/ISSN-1525-9102/v/4/n/1/