multimedia

Time, the magician (2005) is a collaboration by Hazel Smith and Roger Dean written in the real-time algorithmic image-processing program Jitter. The piece begins with a poem, written by Hazel, on the subject of time:  influential on the writing of the poem was Elizabeth Grosz’s The Nick of Time.  The poem is initially performed solo, but as it progresses is juxtaposed with live and improvised sound which includes real-time and pre-recorded sampling and processing of the voice. The performance of the poem is followed (slightly overlapping) by screened text in which the poem is dissected and reassembled. This screened text is combined in Jitter with video of natural vegetation, and the sound and voice samples continue during the visual display.

The text-images are processed in real time so that their timing, order, juxtaposition, design and colours are different each time the work is performed. This Quicktime Movie is therefore only one version of the piece. The sound is from a performance given by austraLYSIS at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music, October 2005. The performers were Roger Dean, computer sound and image; Sandy Evans, saxophone; Hazel Smith, speaker; Greg White, computer sound and sound projection.

 soundAFFECTs, employs the text of 'AFFECTions' by Hazel Smith and Anne Brewster, a fictocritical piece about emotion and affect as its base, but converts it into a piece which combines text as moving image and transforming sound. For the multimedia work Roger Dean programmed a performing interface using the real-time image processing program Jitter; he also programmed a performing interface in MAX/MSP to enable algorithmic generation of the sound. This multimedia work has been shown in performance on many occasions projected on a large screen with live music; the text and sound are processed in real time and each performance is different. Discussed in Hazel Smith 2009. “soundAFFECTs: translation, writing, new media, affect” in Sounds in Translation: Intersections of Music, Technology and Society, Amy Chan and Alistair Noble (eds.), ANU E Press, 2009, pp. 9-24. (Republication of earlier version of the article published in the journal Scan).

Heimlich Unheimlich is a screened, collaborative work consisting of visual collages, performed and displayed mixed genre texts (poetry, narrative, memoir, documentary), manipulations of image using the computer language MAX/MSP/Jitter, composed and improvised music, and vocal and instrumental sound samples. Heim in German means home, so Heimlich Unheimlich could translate loosely as Homely Unhomely. However, heimlich more usually means secretive or hidden while unheimlich means uncanny or weird, so the connotations of the two words can overlap. This relationship between heimlich and unheimlich (discussed in Sigmund Freud’s essay ‘The Uncanny’) underlies the content of the piece. The piece uses the contrasting childhoods of two of the collaborators (the visual artist Sieglinde Karl-Spence and writer Hazel Smith) as a starting point. It focuses on two characters who have names related to forms of cloth that sometimes appear as body parts in the collages. One is Hessian, a German girl born towards the end of the second world war, whose father fought in the German army. She migrates with her family to Australia when she is still a child and eventually becomes an artist. The other is Muslin, a violinist and poet born to a Jewish family in England after the second world war, who migrates to Australia as an adult. Her family are preoccupied with preserving a Jewish ethnicity and avoiding antisemitism: they live in the shadow of the holocaust and are unforgiving of Nazi Germany. Both Muslin and Hessian are shaped by the cultural environments in which they grow up and both in some respects rebel against the constraints of those environments. Heimlich Unheimlich suggests strong crossovers between Muslin and Hessian, in particular intertwining and reconciling their different childhoods. It explores the inter-generational after effects of the Second World War (what Marianne Hirsch calls “postmemory”) and the blending of personal and historical trauma. But the piece also engages with the relationship between autobiography and fiction, the dynamics of families and the enigma of family photographs, the significance of migration, the bonds of ethnic identity, the tension between natural and unnatural environments and the interplay between individualism and convergence that constitutes the collaborative process. The collages use photographs taken from family albums combined with many other visual images such as buildings, ruins, cemeteries, birds, musical notation, boats, flowers, feathers, bones and overlaid text. These collages are algorithmically organised so the order will be different each time the work is performed; split screens are used to juxtapose the changing relationships between the visual and the verbal. The computerised manipulation of the images results in their animation, segmentation and disintegration. Performed text and vocal samples are combined with written text, and different sets of musical materials are identified with Muslin or Hessian. The juxtapositions and transformations of text, image and sound create tensions between representation and abstraction, movement and stasis, continuity and discontinuity. These synergies reinforce the separate but blended identities of the protagonists and the broader social contexts from which they emerge. The work is presented in the form of a video. It combines the live audio recorded when austraLYSIS premiered the piece at the MARCS Institute, Western Sydney University, in 2019 with a studio rendering of the image animation and montage. This represents only one version of the piece, others would be considerably different. The creators of the work are Hazel Smith (text), Sieglinde Karl-Spence (visual images) and Roger Dean (musical composition and image processing). The performers are Hazel Smith (text), Roger Dean (image processing), Sandy Evans, (saxophone), Phil Slater (trumpet) and Greg White (electronics). Claire Grocott and Claire Letitia Reynolds were technical assistants and collaborators in the making of the visual images. The photograph "Boar Lane, looking east,1951" is reproduced by kind permission of Leeds Libraries, www.leodis.net

This work started to be built in the year 2013, out of scripts, texts writing, musical composition, and a crime investigation (aside from the compilation of images from the web) that I carried out during previous years as if gathering pieces from a puzzle. “Hotel Minotaur” first was entitled “It`s Enough to Open a Hotel`s Doors” and I first started to visualize it when writer Fernando Marias, invited me to be part of his anthology “Solitude is the Home of the Monster” (Imagine Press, 2013), with a multimedia piece. To facilitate the reader`s turn from paper to the digital space a QR (Quick Response Code) in the book`s Codex was added.

Staging was possible due to the support of David Losada, who decisively contributed to the idea and the concept and brought the means of Maloka Media, and to the collaboration of Fidel Cordero (music), Jesus Jimenez (design and programming) and Paola Rey (production). Programming of “Hotel Minotaur” was brought to an end back in 2015 with subtle changes on both, text and interface and was part of the Conclusions to the Doctoral Thesis “Form and Core of the Multimedia Narrative” (Humanities, Carlos III University, brilliant cum laude, 2015).

It was first presented on the opening to the European Digital Literatures (House of Velazquez, Madrid, June, 2013) and since its advent it has been a subject to study, being included on the Ciberia Anthology (Madrid Complutense University). It has been translated into French by Christian Roinat and into English by Montague Kobbe.

Crónica de Viaje by Jorge Carrión is a literary work printed in the form of a laptop that uses the Google search engine. Carrión is on a mission to find and learn more about the history of his Andalusian family. He uses Google's features such as images, videos, and maps to discover his identity and history.

A short multimedia-enhanced hypertext game about perpetual cycles of displacement and violence, as seen through the lens of a child. Takes about 15 minutes to read/play, and no gaming skills are required.

Ishmael debuted at the 2017 Spring Thing interactive fiction festival, was selected to be showcased at the PixelPop Festival in St. Louis, was nominated for the "Best Social Impact Game" award at BIG: Brazil’s Independent Games Festival, was an IndieCade Finalist, and was shortlisted for the 2017 New Media Writing Prize.