[-empyre-] Introducing Susan Ballard

["Melinda Rackham" <melinda@subtle.net>]

Susan Ballard is an artist, writer and musician whose interests cover the
broad historical field of new media art with  a particular emphasis on
contemporary digital and time-based installation from Aotearoa/ New Zealand.
Her current  research explores relationships between noise and materiality
in digital installation art.

Susan  serves on the management board of The Physics Room, a contemporary
art project space in Christchurch. Since 1999, she has been a lecturer in
Art Theory at the School of Art in Dunedin. She has also published articles
on contemporary practice in Aotearoa/ New Zealand, and has exhibited her
digital installations and sound works in public galleries and artist-run
spaces.

She also  performs with improvisational sound groups Sleep, PSN Electronic,
and  Charlotte Vale and has released a number of albums. Her early
photographs explored analogue flicker and blur.
http://www.physicsroom.org.nz/space/2002/sensible/

Her more recent visual and sonic practice involves a critical aesthetic
approach to noise, whether as a fragment, generator of chance encounter,
filler of space, or disruptor of time and movement. She is currently working
on a digital video that examines duration and the still image.

Susan is currently based in Sydney, Australia where she is completing her
PhD in digital theory at the College of Fine Arts. Her PhD research revisits
histories of noise as they are constructed in  cinematic and informatic
discourse, and uses these to unpack a contemporary notion of digital
materiality.