Biography

Stephen Barrass is an Associate Professor in the Faculty of Arts and Design at the University of Canberra, where he chairs the Digital Design and Media Arts research cluster, supervises postgraduate students, and lectures in the Master of Digital Design and the Bachelor of Media Arts and Production.

His research interests include digital design and fabrication, interactive storytelling, social media in creative collaboration, physical computing, immersive and wearable interfaces, data sonification, and sound art.

He holds a Graduate Certificate in Higher Education from the University of Canberra (2010). He was granted a Ph.D. in Information Technology from the Australian National University on the topic of Auditory Information Design (1998). His Bachelor of Electrical Engineering from the University of NSW included an honours dissertation on Digital Holograms (1987).

After graduation from the ANU, Stephen took a position as a Postdoctoral Researcher in Virtual Reality, Immersive Media and Kommunications at the Fraunhoffer Institute in Bonn (1998-1999) where he was involved in the development of interactive productions for the 4 walled Virtual Reality Cyberstage. Upon return to Australia he led research on Advanced Audio Interfaces in the ARC funded Collaborative Research Centre on Advanced Computational Systems at the CSIRO ICT Centre in Canberra (2000-2004). Most recently Stephen spent six months as a Guest Researcher in the Sound Design and Perception Team at the Institut de Recherche et Coordination Acoustique/Musique (IRCAM) at the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris (2009).

Academic Publications

An ongoing list of academic publications with links and downloads is available at Academia.edu.
Publishers include MIT Leonardo Music Journal, Cambridge Organised Sound, Springer Virtual Reality, Springer A.I. and Society, Sage Visual Communication, ACM Transactions on Applied Perception, ACM Multimedia Tools and Applications, ACM Multimedia Systems, Elsevier Computers and Graphics, IEEE Expert Systems, IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications, and IEEE Computers in Entertainment.
 

Practice-led Research

A Portfolio of ongoing practice-led research is available at the wordpress blog Swimming Bird.
Various works been curated for public exhibitions that include the Graphite Interactive Art Show Melbourne 2003, Experimenta Prototype in Melbourne 2003, Experimenta House of Tomorrow in Melbourne 2004, Experimenta Vanishing Point in Melbourne 2005, Media City Seoul 2006, Siggraph Boston 2007, Experimenta Under the Radar at FACT in Liverpool and the ICA in London 2007, the International Symposium on Electronic Arts in Singapore 2008, Touch at the Maquarie University Gallery in 2008, The Dog in Contemporary Australian Art at Port Maquarie Gallery in 2008, the New Interfaces for Musical Expression public concert at Goosens Hall in Sydney 2010, the Concert of the Sound and Music Computing Symposium in Barcelona 2010, Touch Too at the UTS in Sydney in 2011,  and the International Conference on Auditory Display in Budapest 2011.

Major Creative Works

The Welcome Space to the Gallery of First Australians at the National Museum of Australia was one of five major multimedia exhibits commissioned as permanent exhibits for the opening in 2001.

The Listening to the Mind Listening concert of EEG Sonifications was a ticketed event staged at the Sydney Opera House Studio in 2004.
 
The Cocktail Party Effect was an interactive sculpture commissioned for Experimenta Vanishing Point which also received an Honourable mention in the SensAble haptic Challenge at Siggraph 2006.

ZiZi the Affectionate Couch is an interactive couch that now resides in the collection of the Museum of Old and New Art in Hobart since it opened in 2011.