Stephen Jones

On Tuesday 6 October 2026 Jones was assaulted outside his studio in Sydney. He was taken to Royal Prince Alfred Hospital and died there on the afternoon of Thursday 8 October 2026, aged 75. His brother Ian and partner Wendy were holding his hands, according to a statement posted on his Facebook page on 9 October, which said he died peacefully after visits from friends.

The statement said a man had been arrested and charged with manslaughter and was being held without bail, and asked people to respect the ongoing investigation and refrain from speculation. Resident Advisor reported his death on 12 October, and tributes followed from artist-run and electronic music communities in Australia.

Stephen Raoul Jones was born in Sydney, New South Wales, on 23 January 1951. A friend who studied in Canberra at the same time recalled that Jones was a student at the Australian National University in the early 1970s.

He began making video art and documentation works in 1975, at a time when portable video equipment was new and artists were only starting to experiment with it in Australia.

Jones's early tapes documented and extended the international video art movement as it reached Australia. Hunting for the Future (1977) recorded Nam June Paik and Charlotte Moorman's 1976 visit to the Art Gallery of New South Wales; it is held by that gallery and the Queensland Art Gallery and was shown in Tell Me, Tell Me, a Museum of Contemporary Art exhibition that toured South Korea in 2011. With composer Warren Burt he made Three Texts at La Trobe University in 1977, and his Stonehenge, TV Buddha and Tai Chi Transforms (The Systems Interfacing Reports), made between 1976 and 1978, is in the National Gallery of Australia. He co-curated Videotapes from Australia, which toured internationally in 1979 and 1980.

In 1982 he joined Severed Heads, the Sydney electronic group led by Tom Ellard. Over the next decade the band released six albums and tracks including Dead Eyes Opened, Petrol and All Saint's Day. Jones designed and built analogue video synthesisers used in the group's concerts and music videos, making Severed Heads one of the few bands of the era with a dedicated live video performer. He left in 1992.

Jones also worked for many years as a video post-production engineer and helped galleries and museums conserve electronic artworks. In 1996 he received a New Media Arts Fellowship from the Australia Council for the Arts for The Brain Project, a website on the science of consciousness. He earned a PhD in 2007 with research on the history of the electronic arts in Australia up to 1975, published by MIT Press in 2011 as Synthetics: Aspects of Art and Technology in Australia, 1956 to 1975. In 2013 he was guest curator of This is Video at Artspace, Sydney, part of ISEA 2013, which revisited the 1981 exhibition Video Art from Australia first presented in Venice.

Jones lived and worked in Sydney, where he kept a studio and a large private archive documenting Australian artists who worked with art and technology. He was survived by his brother Ian and his partner Wendy, who were with him when he died. Friends described him as a generous mentor and a quiet, enigmatic presence.

Jones is remembered as a pioneer of analogue video synthesis in Australia and as the person who did most to write the history of Australian electronic art. Synthetics remains the standard account of the field's early decades, and his archive and the Synthetics website preserve records of work that might otherwise have been lost. For fans of Severed Heads, his hand-built video systems are inseparable from the band's 1980s performances.