Steven Ball has worked in film, video, sound, and installation since the early 1980s. His early practice combined super 8 film and video, and later encompassed digital audio-visual media, in exhibition, online and live, audio-visual and spoken-word performance. Since 1979 he has occasionally produced music with Philip Sanderson as part of the Storm Bugs, DIY music group, and more recently solo song recordings and performances.

A selection of moving image works made from 1990 to the present can be viewed at the Steven Ball film and video archive. He has also made films with Philip Sanderson as part of the late 1980s Apostrophe S trilogy, which they revisited for Film of the Same Name in 2015.

His recent work has developed from an early engagement with landscape and spatial representation, with an emphasis on relationships between local and global situations, reflecting various social, political, environmental and post-colonial conditions, often situated within and between the UK and Australia, where he lived and worked from 1988 to 2000.

These concerns are manifested in works such as ‘The Ground, the Sky, and the Island’ (video, 2008), ‘Speakers’ (spoken word/sound performance, various iterations London and Sydney 2009 – 2016), and his collaboration with John Conomos, ‘Deep Water Web’ (Furtherfield Gallery and online 2016). More locally the experimental documentary ‘Concrete Heart Land’ (video with Rastko Novaković, 2014) traces issues surrounding the gentrification of Elephant and Castle in South London. His moving image work has screened widely internationally.

Recent song recording projects include: All Living Can Anyone Be Here (Linear Obsessional 2020); Looking After The Duck (with Jude Cowan Montague as Crumpsall Riddle, Wormhole World, 2020); Abstract Vectoral Landscapes; (TQN-aut, 2019), and Bastard Island (Linear Obsessional, 2019).

Since 2003 he has been Research Fellow at University of the Arts London, in the context of the British Artists' Film and Video Study Collection at Central Saint Martins. His research has encompassed historical and contemporary artists' moving image. He has written and presented on contemporary and historical moving image related art practice. He was co-editor of and contributor to Expanded Cinema: Art Performance Film (Tate Publishing, 2011), has written for Moving Image Review and Art Journal (MIRAJ) and Senses of Cinema, and has presented at the Art Association of Australia and New Zealand conference in Brisbane, Tate Britain, and Menzies Australia Institute, King’s College London, among others.

Collections: LUX (London), British Film Institute, CaixaForum (Spain), dLux Media Arts (Sydney), Deakin University (Melbourne).

He is a founder member of the sensingsite para-academic research group, which engages with questions around the political, material, and sensory natures of site, place, and space.
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