Creative collaboration, racial discrimination and surveillance in The Lips are Different

This essay addresses the ideas and approaches involved in the creation of a collaborative multimedia piece, The Lips are Different, by Hazel Smith and Roger Dean. The piece is about the Canadian citizen Suaad Hagi Mohamud — born in Somalia — who was accused of not being a Canadian citizen when she tried to return to Canada from Kenya in 2009. The work links over-surveillance, racial discrimination, photography, media representation and issues of identity. It comprises real-time video written in Jitter; improvised music based on a comprovisation score; and performed text presented both acoustically and as video image. The essay illuminates the process of making the The Lips are Different, and the collaborative methods involved in constructing and presenting it. It demonstrates the reciprocal relationship between research and creative development that underpins the piece. As part of this continuing relationship between research and creative work, Roger Dean has used machine learning to generate new text for this essay. This text generation, which appears in the right-hand column, resulted from evolving computational deep learning models.