Writing and Society Research group members have special expertise and experience in this area. Hazel Smith’s new media creative collaborations, with Roger Dean and the sound and multimedia group austraLYSIS, are available on numerous websites (see www.australysis.com) and also in her book and CD-Rom, The Erotics of Geography: poems, performance texts, new media works, Tinfish Press, Hawaii, 2008. Author of The Writing Experiment: strategies for innovative creative writing and several other books, she has authored or co-authored well over a dozen articles and book chapters specifically on new media writing.

Anna Gibbs is a longtime experimental and fictocritical writer who sees a continuity between these modes and writing for new media. She is co-editor of 2 collections of contemporary Australian writing (Frictions and No Substitute) and is currently working on a third. She has collaborated in electronic installations with visual artist Nola Farman (including The Braille Book, MCA; and CarSick, AGNSW), and curated an exhibition of Artist Bookworks at Horus and Deloris Gallery, Sydney. She has also published book chapters on new media writing with Maria Angel, and they have also presented papers at the ELO annual conference, the Media Upheavals Research Centre conference on “Beyond the Screen: Transformations of Literary Structures, Interfaces and Genres” at the University of Siegen, and the Digital Arts and Culture Conference, University of California, Irvine.

Current new media research projects within the Writing and Society Research Group (also involving collaborations with other groups and individuals outside the group) include:

• ‘Writing in the Media Culture’: Anna Gibbs, Maria Angel, Rachel Morley and Joe Tabbi, (Director of the Electronic Literature Organisation in the US). This 3-part project involves the construction of an online annotated directory of Australian new media writers and their work to be wrapped by the ELO Directory; a series of interviews with new media writers to be excerpted online, and a book by Anna Gibbs and Maria Angel (At the Interface: Writing, Memory, and Motion) which explores the affective and corporeal dimensions of writing in new media environments, and the way the literary genres are remediated in them.

• A research initiative by Hazel Smith on interactions between sound, image and writing in new media. This is part of a broader project on relationships between literature, voice and music, and focuses on both screen-based and voice-based new media contexts.

• The Verbal Interactivity Project (VIP). This project which involves Hazel Smith and Prof. Roger Dean (MARCS Auditory Laboratories, UWS) was initiated at the University of Canberra and has involved a number of collaborators/programmers (David Worrall, Michael Bilstra, John Drummond). It focuses on the computerised generation of text, and has both research and creative outcomes.

• Continuing creative projects and collaborations projects involving performances and publications by Hazel Smith with Roger Dean and austraLYSIS, and collaborations by Anna Gibbs with various new media artists.

• soundsRite, edited by Hazel Smith and Roger Dean, a journal of online sound and writing: http://soundsrite.uws.edu.au/

For more information about the Group and its members, please see our
website:

http://www.uws.edu.au/writing_society/writing_and_society

Hazel Smith's Lovely Book

This book addresses one of the most exciting and innovative developments within higher education: the rise in prominence of the creative arts and the accelerating recognition that creative practice is a form of research. The book considers how creative practice can lead to research insights through what is often known as practice-led research. But unlike other books on practice-led research, it balances this with discussion of how research can impact positively on creative practice through research-led practice. The editors posit an iterative and web-like relationship between practice and research. Essays within the book cover a wide range of disciplines including creative writing, dance, music, theatre, film and new media, and the contributors are from the UK, US, Canada and Australia. The subject is approached from numerous angles: the authors discuss methodologies of practice-led research and research-led practice, their own creative work as a form of research, research training for creative practitioners, and the politics and histories of practice-led research and research-led practice within the university. The book will be invaluable for creative practitioners, researchers, students in the creative arts and university leaders. Key Features *The first book to document, conceptualise and analyse practice-led research in the creative arts and to balance it with research-led practice *Written by highly qualified academics and practitioners across the creative arts and sciences *Brings together empirical, cultural and creative approaches *Presents illuminating case histories of creative work and practice-led research

About the Authors
Hazel Smith is a Research Professor in the Writing and Society Research Group at the University of Western Sydney. She is author of The Writing Experiment: strategies for innovative creative writing (2005) and Hyperscapes in the Poetry of Frank O’Hara (2000). Hazel is also a widely published writer, performer and new media artist. Her latest volume,The Erotics of Geography, 2008, is accompanied by a CD-Rom of works with Roger Dean. Roger Dean is a Research Professor in the MARCS Auditory Laboratories, University of Western Sydney. He has published five books on improvisation, and is a former university president and medical research institute director. A composer-improviser, he is the founder and director of the sound and intermedia ensemble austraLYSIS, of which Hazel is also a member.

Hazel Smith, U of Western Sydney

They are “Affect, Emotion and Sensation in New Media Writing: the work of John Cayley, M.D. Covereley and Jason Nelson” in Literature and Sensation (eds. Anthony Ulhmann, Helen Groth, Paul Sheehan and Stephen McLaren), Cambridge Scholars Press, 2009 and “Textual variability in new media poetry” in Multiformalisms (Susan Schultz and Annie Finch eds.), World Tech Communications LLC. pp. 485-516.
Hazel