Who is Stephen Jones?

Stephen Jones (born 1951, lives in Sydney, Australia) is an Australian video artist of long standing. He was originally a member of Bush Video (1974-5) and then worked at the Paddington Video Access Centre for several years (1976-78). In 1974 he worked with Nam June Paike before providing technical support for many major exhibitions including the Sydney Biennales and Perspectas from 1976 to 1985. He curated VideoTapes from Australia (with Bernice Murphy) which toured the United States and Canada as well as being shown at the AGNSW (1979-80). He established the independent video production facility Heuristic Video in 1982, working with numerous video artists and independent videomakers. From 1983 to 1992 he was the videomaker for the electronic music band Severed Heads. Between 1989 and 1996 he worked as an engineer for several major video post-production and computer graphic production facilities. In 1996 he re-started his career as an artist and in 1998 received a New Media Arts Fellowship.

In 1998 he produced a first pass of a history of the electronically generated image in Australia for dLux Media Arts for a symposium called Synthetics, which was presented at the PowerHouse museum in July that year. He also built and showed The Reading Machine a Brain Project installation at ArtSpace, Sydney, July, 1998. He has been involved with the philosophical aspects of the nature of consciousness for almost longer than his involvement in video and has been producing The Brain Project web site <http://www.culture.com.au/brain_proj/> since August 1996. He provides technical support for artists, developing sensor-controlled systems for interactive video/DVD installations and has also built Artificial Life installation projects for artists at ATR in Japan. As an artist himself, he builds physical immersion installations based on the incunabula of computing, as well as developing theoretical perspectives on artificial intelligence and augmented environments. His considerable experience in electronics in the arts means that he is now Australia’s first conservator of electronic art.

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