Hazel Smith

Emerging from the Experiment: A Systematic Methodology for Creative Writing Teaching

This paper argues for a particular teaching methodology for creative writing that produces a multilayered poetics of writing. This methodology is the basis for my book The Writing Experiment: Strategies for Innovative Creative Writing, and is specifically designed for higher-education creative writing students, though it can be used by others. The methodology conceptualises the process of writing as systematic, and breaks it down into incremental stages that nevertheless have open-ended outcomes. It emphasises experimental writing and a politics and ethics of form; it also uses literary and cultural theory to theorise the process of writing. In addition it approaches writing as an endeavour that extends beyond the written page into performance and new media work. All these different aspects of the methodology are interrelated and overlapping. In this paper I elucidate contexts and specifics of these different approaches, and show how they are integrated so that they reverberate with, and extend, each other.

The mirage of real-time algorithmic synaesthesia : some compositional mechanisms and research agendas in computer music and sonification

This article looks at algorithmic synaesthesia, a form of sonic intermedia involving synchronous computer-mediated manipulation of sound and image. In algorithmic synaesthesia extensively shared features are created in the two media. Examples of such work by austraLYSIS and others are discussed. What an audience member can cognitively access in such synaesthesia is considered: creators of intermedia works may overestimate this. The fact that a machine can process image and sound in parallel, and by the same algorithm, does not establish that the human brain can.  The transparency of an algorithmic process to a listener-viewer-screener is a core issue in auditory display (or ‘sonification’). Sonification aims to make the segmentation of a data set more accessible than it is when represented numerically or visually, and has many practical and creative applications. Current approaches in experimental cognition may assist us in evaluating these issues.

The Erotics of Gossip: Fictocriticism, Performativity, Technology

This paper concerns The Erotics of Gossip, a radio piece by composer Roger Dean and me. This piece was written for the ABC Listening Room radio programme in 2001, and can be heard on the ABC Website (Smith & Dean, 2001). The Erotics of Gossip makes ‘talk’ its subject matter. It explores the nature of gossip, and suggests that it can be either destructive or creative, ethical or unethical, depending on its cultural context. To do this it draws on, and transmutes, a range of theoretical material and historical documentation about gossip. The Erotics of Gossip is one of a series of collaborations called sound technodramas, written by Roger Dean and me since 1991. A sound technodrama is a hybrid form which mixes performance, sound, technology, and different genres of writing. It explores writing from the perspective of contemporary modes of orality, the relationship between language and sound, and the impact that new technologies can have on writing. Particularly important in sound technodrama is exploration of the voice and its digital manipulation. This is very apt in The Erotics of Gossip, as the piece is about the way talk has shaped our histories and permeates out social existence. I want to show here how The Erotics of Gossip explores the conjunction of academic and creative approaches to writing, and discuss some of the advantages of this approach. To this end I also want to suggest that The Erotics of Gossip, as a sound technodrama, might be viewed as a form of ‘performative fictocriticism’. In Australia the movement known as fictocriticism (sometimes referred to in the United States as the postcritical) has included such scholars and writers as Anne Brewster, Moya Costello, Anna Gibbs, Heather Kerr, Stephen Muecke, Amanda Nettlebeck, Katrina Schlunke and Ros Prosser, and is partly documented in the The Space Between (Kerr & Nettlebeck, 1998).