steve middleton
melbourne australia
- short bio -
Dr. Steven Middleton was born in Birmingham Accident Hospital and grew up on the Oxfordshire Downs in England, where his grandfather was a hedge-weaver and roof-thatcher. He made his home in Australia aged 13, and became involved in politics, film-making, art, television and academia. He works with artificial intelligence, robot technologies, compliant servomechanisms and virtual reality to create performance and installation art.
Steve`s work has been referenced in a lot of books, journals and collections. He takes pride in being cited in publications as diverse as David Stratton`s "The Avocado Tree", "The Cyborg Experiments: Extensions of the Body in the Media Age" (Continuum 2002), and Stelarc: the Monograph (2007).
Steve transferred his drawing skills to computers in the late 1970`s and began to work with primitive virtual-reality animation techniques in 1981, and later with other artists during the late 1980`s at the CITRI virtual reality research centre in Melbourne. He campaigned, with many others, as Unlimited Television inc. (TVU), to create the national communications planning infrastructure for Australian community television channel 31, and succeeded in 1987. He is a past President of Community Media Services Inc, a not-for-profit association helping communities make media.
Steve lectured at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, in Melbourne, Australia, during the 1990`s, while gaining degrees in communications and information technology.
He began to integrate computer animation, music and video projections during performances at the Glasshouse Theatre in Melbourne during 1988 and 1989. A large mainstream audience came to the National Gallery of Victoria to see an installation of sixty-five video monitors called Crash Course made, with Rebecca Young, for Installation Publication and the Next Wave Festival of 1992.
In 1993 he created a feature-length animation with eight computers live in front of an astonished full house at the Valhalla Cinema, Melbourne (Cybertronic Psychorama:November 1993).
Steve has been associated with electronic dance music since the mid 1980`s. He invented Don`t Shoot the Messenger, with Attilio Gangemi, to perform at dance parties. Using video projections the size of a small block of flats, computer animation and analog and digital effects to create massive visual installations, Don`t Shoot the Messenger toured Australian and European alternative music festivals and was exhibited at the Scienceworks museum of technology, Melbourne, in 1995.
Steve worked with Adem Jaffers to produced the first world-wide internet telecast from Australia during the Experimenta Festival in 1994, and demonstrate internet-controlled television in Melbourne on Channel 31/RMITV (Spectrum Interactive, eight episodes) in 1995.
He performed at the Australian Film Institute awards in 1996, exhibited a series of robotic works in Australia and Europe from 1997 to the present and has lately worked with Stelarc to develop prosthetic and robotic devices for performance work.
Steve has a B.A. degree in Communications, an M.A by research degree in Animation and Interactive Media, and a PhD in the application of artificial intelligence and robotics in art.
Steve suffers from synaesthesia brought about by a chronic nervous system disorder. He lives in tranquil semi-retirement with his wife Debra, a lawyer, in Melbourne, Australia.