poetry

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).

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.

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/ 

nstabilities 2 [...] subjects a discontinuous text to various kinds of processing. The screen is divided into three sections which counterpoint each other. The top section consists of a video made by Hazel Smith comprising twelve short texts. The middle section consists of the same material processed in the program Jitter by Roger Dean, and involves various forms of overlaying, erasing and stretching of the words. In a third section of the screen the same texts together with others which do not appear in the top movie are processed in real-time by Roger Dean by means of a Text Transformation Toolkit (TTT) written in Python. The processing substitutes words and letters so that new text emerges, together with a spoken realization of some parts of the text, new and old. The pre-written fragments circle around the idea of social, historical, and psychological instabilities, but during the processing new instabilities syntactical, semantic, and phonemic also arise.  Improvised and composed music is performed by Roger Dean, Greg White, Phil Slater and Sandy Evans. In addition, computer-synthesised voices add an aural dimension to textual change.

 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

Robopoem@s consist of five insect-like robots whose legs and bodies are engraved with the seven parts of a poem@ (“poema” in Spanish) written from the robot’s point of view in bilingual format (my original Spanish with English translations by Kristin Dykstra). Voice activation, micro-mp3 players, and response to sensors (reactive to obstacles) allow these quadrupeds to interact with humans and with each other, emphasizing the existential issues addressed in the poem. The final segment of the poem, number VII, re-phrases the biblical pronouncement on the creation of humans, as perceived by the robot: “According to your likeness / my Image.” With this statement, the notion of creation is reformulated and bent by the power of electronics, ultimately questioning its binary foundations.

in a planet earth with out humans a old chinese poet is still alive a fight vs the alien occupation and extraction of earth. Is the battle of the carbon based life in planet earth. So a ambassador from the year 8888 came to 4444 to hear the poems of Li Po. Then, the antidote to capitalism that we know thanks to Li Po poems is send to our times for sell as Rice to prevent the alien occupation. 8888 is the code that the future send with the antidote.

A “book post” is placed in the UiB Humanities Library during March 2021, consisting of a table/desk with two stools by it, near a wall.

Four books are on the table/desk (left to right, in alphabetical order by title): Articulations (Allison Parrish), Golem (Nick Montfort), A Noise Such as a Man Might Make: A Novel (Milton Läufer), and Travesty Generator (Lillian-Yvonne Bertram). Each has a hole drilled through it in the upper left and is secured to the table with a cable, creating a chained library. The books represent the work of four participants in an SLSAeu panel about computer-generated literature.

A Kodak carousel slide projector is in the middle of the table/desk, projecting small, bright images and texts onto the wall. Slides presenting covers and contents of the five books are shown continually during the exhibition. The selections will be made in consultation with all author/programmers and with their approval.

The stools allow two readers to sit and peruse the books. The table is wide enough to allow readers to do so while socially distanced.

The presence of a functioning “obsolete” slide projector, and the establishment of an “obsolete” chained library within the Humanities library, suggests to visitors that the book is also obsolete — while it is, at the same time, a perfectly functional technology. The dissonance of presenting computer-generated text via film slides and analog projection resonates with the decision that this group of five author/programmers has made: to present our computational writing in codex form.

The chained library is both practical and symbolic. Given that this is a library exhibit, the cables prevent people from relocating the books as one typically does in a library. They also emphasize that while we value ubiquity and portability in the digital age, at the same time we want things tethered, grounded, and available at the expected location. This suggestion will be strengthened by the similarity between the way these books are tethered and the way computer equipment is secured to a desk.

The projection of course alerts visitors to the availability of the books. Even if visitors do not choose to sit and peruse these books, the projected texts allow them to see and read computer-generated writing from recent years. Those who only view the projections nevertheless get a sense of the wide variety of approaches and the many textures of language that are seen in this sort of experimental digital writing.