“Afterlives and underbellies: writing research”

I will discuss the way I have combined creative practice and academic research, and my belief that interweaving these activities can produce a fruitful approach to knowledge. The relationship between my creative work and research has been a complex one in which each has spoken to — and extended —  the other through a variety of processes such as symbiosis, juxtaposition, alternation and transfer.

I will also talk about my commitment to extending writing into music and the visual arts, and suggest that any concept of the literary must change in response to multimedia culture. In my creative work I have engaged with ‘morphing writing practices’: these range from writing for the page to collaborations involving performance, visual imagery and new media technologies . Such collaborative projects, I suggest, intensify the sensory and affective impact of my work as well as strengthening its capacity for social and psychological comment.  In my research work this interest in the extra-literary currently takes the form of projects on musico-literary discourse and writing and technology.

I will illustrate my lecture with examples from some of my collaborative works with Roger Dean, including The Afterlives of Betsy Scott —  a sound technodrama about Elizabeth Scott the first woman to be executed in Victoria in 1863 which also investigates a  number of cultural ‘underbellies’ —  and Time the Magician, a meditation on time, evolution and gender which includes performance, sound and screened text.

Hazel Smith is a research professor in the Writing and Society Research Group at the University of Western Sydney. From 2002-2007 she was a Senior Research Fellow in the School of Creative Communication, University of Canberra, and a member of the Sonic Communications Research Group. Before that she was a Senior Lecturer at the University of New South Wales where she founded the Creative Writing program.

Hazel is author of The Writing Experiment: strategies for innovative creative writing, Allen and Unwin, 2005, which was shortlisted for the Australian Publishing Awards for Excellence in Educational Publishing, and Hyperscapes in the Poetry of Frank O'Hara: difference, homosexuality, topography, Liverpool University Press, 2000. She is co-author, with Roger Dean, of Improvisation, Hypermedia And The Arts Since 1945, Harwood Academic, 1997. She is currently co-editing with Roger Dean a book, Practice-led Research/Research-led Practice in the Creative Arts, for Edinburgh University Press.

Hazel is also a creative writer and works in the areas of poetry, performance and new media. A web page about her creative work can be accessed at www.australysis.com. She has published three volumes of poetry, the latest of which, The Erotics of Geography, Tinfish Press, 2008 is accompanied by a CD-Rom of new media and performance works with Roger Dean. She has made three CDs of her performance work and is  co-author with Roger Dean of numerous new media works, many available on the Internet. She has also collaborated on several occasions with visual artist Sieglinde Karl, and their joint work has been exhibited in many art galleries in Australia and overseas. She is a founding member of austraLYSIS, the international sound and new media arts group, and has performed her own work extensively nationally and internationally. She has been co-recipient of numerous grants from the Australia Council, The Australian Film Commission and Arts Tasmania, and has had many works commissioned by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. One of her collaborations with Roger Dean, Poet without Language, was nominated by the ABC for the Prix Italia in 1992.

Hazel was the founder editor of infLect, an online international journal of multimedia writing based at the University of Canberra. She had a previous career as a professional musician, was leader of LYSIS and SONANT, and can be heard as a solo violinist on several commercial recordings.