Who am i?

Sally Pryor description

I'm hard to define: an (award-winning) artist, programmer, educator, animator, and biological scientist.

 

I am a techie creative: as passionate about IT, science and electronics as I am about creative expression, communication (in all its forms) and collaboration. Learning and user experience design is integrated with all these areas of expertise. I've lived and worked in a number of countries and now live in Coffs Harbour.

 

In 2023 I took a year off to study fashion design and technology. I can now upcycle and make my own clothes. Well, I have a very good foundation …


During 2022 I worked at FourthRev, a global startup that integrates quality technology education with academic rigour, value & certification. I developed data analytics courses and found data visualisation (helping data to tell its stories) to be especially compelling. I'm planning to integrate this with my creative practice.


Prior to FourthRev, I was at Chameleon Software. My first task was to give the online help site a major makeover by developing most of its core learning content, including technical writing, graphics and animated explainer videos, for example the following:

I also designed and presented in-house and external training and worked on the Support desk, trouble-shooting solutions to customer issues.

 

Prior to Chameleon, I created content at Janison, a company, that designs and delivers cloud-based Learning Management Systems internationally. My work involved technical writing, infographics development and e-learning. A particular focus was the the company's evolving help site.

 

And before Janison, I lectured in Media Design at James Cook Uni in Townsville. I taught a broad range of design subjects: interactive, web, graphic, animation, publication and information design. I remained an Adjunct Lecturer at JCU until early 2018.

 

I've also been learning electronics and exploring the creative, educational and communicational possibilities of Arduino-based responsive objects. My first project was The Shrimp in 2014, a piece of wearable electronics art (an interactive dress) that I created at my ZigZag Electronic Lab residency. I've put some of my electronics projects online, including an interactive traffic light badge with multiple applications.

 

I also developed a series of greeting cards and prints, using Photoshop and Illustrator.

 

As the interactive diagram at the top suggests, I occupy an intersection of at least four disciplines: design, IT, art and science. This has not always been easy, as these areas have often been considered to be quite separate from each other.

I am comfortable with technology and love learning about it and writing code – building solutions and resolving software bugs – especially when there's an interactive and/or animated, audiovisual outcome. I love to learn and have high-level communication skills in many media forms. I also love creative work: everything from developing solutions for design problems to creating solo or collaborative artistic works. My tecnical and scientific training forms a lifelong foundation to all this.

I'm experienced with integrating these disciplines in projects that combine, for example, design and IT, or science and communication. I have worked alone, collaboratively or as a project manager. Having taught at a range of levels, studied and supervised PhD students, I have developed skills in research, grant writing, communication, pedagogy, online education and clear, coherent writing and presentation skills. More generally, I can capably produce many forms of communication: written, verbal, visual, audiovisual, interactive, and so on.

I returned to industry in 2015 after a number of years as an academic and designer/artist in the digital media/new media area. I have also worked in hospitals and the IT /media industries in a number of cultures: Australia, America and the Middle East.

I originally trained as a biochemist before retraining in IT when this was a small and relatively unpopular field. Later, I linked programming with creative work and was again amongst international pioneers, this time in 3D computer animation, digital art and interactive multimedia. I have participated in periods of tremendous IT growth, which show no signs of slowing down.

In the 90s I became interested in what is now called User Experience, linking integrationism, a theory of language and human communication, with human-computer interaction. My internationally successful CD-ROM, Postcard From Tunis, artistically expressed integrationist theory and extended it into human-computer interaction, as my PhD thesis explains. I continue to be involved with this challenging theoretical approach. Later, I designed and programmed the interactive artwork Postcards From Writing to offer an accessible introduction to and experience of the theory. I was awarded a New Media Arts Fellowship from the Australia Council in 1999.

Other projects included teaching myself to write apps: my app proof of concept visualises Year 7 math using chocolate. In 2013 I created an exhibition with two others, On Medication, that investigated the experience of being on medication. And as part of coming to grips with the tropical experience, I wrote a paper studying creativity in the tropics and made an animated web work where I visualised encounters with a number of tropical hazards, such as cyclones and stingers.

Previous artworks include Ephemeron, an interactive audiovisual sculpture, collaboratively-developed with artists in four countries as part of eMobilArt. A much earlier work, Dream House, was a pioneering 3D computer animated film, the first Australian entry selected for SIGGRAPH (1984) in the USA.

 

A collection of my creative work can be accesed via the Works link at the top of the page. Selected pieces of writing are accessed via the Writing link.