The Writing and Society Research Group, University of Western Sydney, has a special focus on writing in digital media. We are currently seeking applications from suitably qualified prospective PhD and DCA students in this area. Projects are welcome which focus on any aspect of new media writing from the perspectives of theory or practice.
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
