One the photographers in the core programme of the Ballarat International Foto Biennale 2011 is Judith Crispin, an Australian photographer, poet and composer who lives and works in Berlin, Germany.

Crispin was a coordinator of music at the School of Creative Arts, University of Southern Queensland where she lectured in composition, musicology and orchestration, and is now an Alexander von Humboldt postdoctoral fellow she researches early electronic music and electro-acoustic music and their basis in the pataphysical.

Her series The Cartogrophers Illusion, in which her photography is paired with her poetry, aims to:

represent memory as record and simulacrum without abstraction or objectivity, the emotional spaces where memory becomes signifier and symbol- a representational territory transformed by light to function as a mirror of being.

I understand that pataphors extend reality, by way of imagining and treating the imagined as real, thus inducing the senses to inhabit the atmosphere of the creatively described reality. The pataphor seeks to describe a new and separate world, in which an idea or aspect of a concept has taken on a life of its own.

As an Alexander von Humboldt postdoctoral fellow Crispin is conducting research for a book on the encryption of esoteric ideas in the music of Ferruccio Busoni, Pierre Schaeffer and the 2nd Viennese School. The focus of my research, past and present, has been the transmission of the western esoteric tradition via musical cryptology, particularly in the work of Ferruccio Busoni and Larry Sitsky.