Artist Mizuho Nishioka's photographic work and research offers a new approach to photographic image-making – and disrupts our expectations of the technological production of a photograph, opening up territory for the photographer’s creative agency.

Her series MachineTime_NatureTime, enmeshes the familiarity of the botanic and the unfamiliarity of marks made by technological disruptions. Movement 67_N, part of this series, captures fragments of botanical specimens floating, suspended in the picture plane. The artist photographed petals, leaves, and twigs ‘in nature’ being moved by wind, then, through pushing the digitisation technology beyond its limits, glitches and distorts the image. Interested in the space in-between these two worlds of nature and the machine, Nishioka’s work creates a complex map of nature growing, wind blowing, computer algorithms and pixilation, revealing the dis-synchronization of these unseen processes.

Dr Mizuho Nishoka graduated with the first PhD in Photography in New Zealand at Massey University Wellington in 2016, also becoming the first student in Fine Arts to a receive a Vice-Chancellor’s Doctoral scholarship. Nishioka has exhibited at public galleries and artist run spaces, including City Gallery Wellington and Blue Oyster Art Gallery in Dunedin. Nishoka is a lecturer in Photography at Victoria University School of Design and Architecture.