Hazel Smith & Roger Dean will perform at the next Other Room on Wednesday 2nd July for a special evening of digital poetics at The Castle Hotel, Oldham Street, Manchester, M2 4PD, 7 PM start. Biographical details below. The film above shows a performance by Roger who, with Hazel is part of the musical collective Australysis. The other performers will be Clive Fencott and Robin Fencott.

Bios.:

Hazel Smith is a research professor in the Writing and Society Research Centre at the University of Western Sydney. She is author of The Writing Experiment: strategies for innovative creative writing, Allen and Unwin, 2005 and Hyperscapes in the Poetry of Frank O’Hara: difference, homosexuality, topography, Liverpool University Press, 2000. She is co-author ofImprovisation, Hypermedia And The Arts Since 1945, Harwood Academic, 1997 and co-editor with Roger Dean of Practice-led Research, Research-led Practice in the Creative Arts, Edinburgh University Press, 2009.   She is co-editor with Roger Dean ofsoundsRite, a journal of new media writing and sound, based at the University of Western Sydney. Hazel is a poet, performer and new media artist, and has published three volumes of poetry, three CDs of performance work and numerous multimedia works. The Erotics of Geography: poetry, performance texts, new media works,  a volume of creative work with accompanying CD Rom, was published by Tinfish Press, Kaneohe, Hawaii, 2008, and a  new volume of poetry will be published by Giramondo Publishing in Sydney in 2015. She is a member of austraLYSIS, the sound and intermedia arts group, and has performed her work extensively in US, Europe, UK and Australasia. She also had a previous career as a professional violinist. Her website is at www.australysis.com

Roger Dean is a composer/improviser, and a researcher in music cognition/computation at MARCS Institute, University of Western Sydney. He founded the creative ensemble austraLYSIS, which has performed in 30 countries. He has worked in classical, new, and jazz/improvised music as double bassist, pianist and computer artist. His performing experience ranges from the Academy of Ancient Music to the London Sinfonietta and the leading new music groups in London (1970s to 80s).  It also includes work as piano accompanist for singers and instrumentalists in classical music and jazz. His improvising collaborations range from Curson, Stanko, Wheeler to Parker, Bailey, McLean and Prévost. In Australia he has played with an equally wide range of musicians, including Ambarchi, Avenaim, Buck, Denley, Evans, Ng, Slater, and White.  Dean’s work is on 50 commercial audio CDs, and he has collaborated on many digital intermedia pieces. He is engaged in new media collaborations with artists such as Keith Armstrong, Will Luers, and Hazel Smith. Improvisation and computer-interaction merge in his solo MultiPiano Event (live piano, real-time audio processing, generative piano, and electroacoustic sound). Dean is one of two Australians to be subjects in both the Grove Dictionaries of Music and of Jazz. He has previously founded and directed a medical research institute, and been Vice-Chancellor and President of the University of Canberra. His biography is on Wikipedia.