Chris Barker

Dr. Chris Barker

Senior Lecturer

Details

About

Chris Barker is an artist and researcher, who lectures in Animation and Computer Graphics at RMIT at the Centre for Animation and Interactive Media (AIM).

Chris is the Creative Director and Production designer for a new media company urbanskinning, creating immersive animated environments for stage and events. Chris has worked as an animator and compositor of visual effects for film and television, and has exhibited his work as visual artist nationally and internationally.

Chris’s research is primarily focused in augmented architecture, virtual heritage and creative entrepreneurship.

Chris has worked as Art Director in the design of sets and stage shows, with Pixellated Sea, a collaboration with Chrissie Parrot for WAPA, and The Last Days of Judas Iscariot in Brisbane. Chris has exhibited work at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image with Stand Here (Eyes, Lies and Illusions, 2006–2007) and has shown spatially-based projection installations in China (Shark Soup, 2006), (Bullet Point, 2008), Japan (Zaim, 2007) and New Zealand(Bullet Point, 2006). He has collaborated with Keith Armstrong on the work Knowmore – House of Commons, 2009 (Brisbane, Montreal), a major real time table-based tangible media work. Chris has been commissioned by the Australian Centre for the Moving Image (ACMI) for a projected illusion-based work for their permanent exhibition The Way Forward (2009). His work has been reviewed by prominent magazines and publications in design studies, virtual heritage, and illusion in Art.

Industry Experience-
Links to industry
Member of Melbourne ACM SIGGRAPH Professional Chapter
Member of CG Society

Exhibitions (solo or group exhibition of work) :
Knowmore,(House of Commons), Table-based interactive work with Keith Armstrong, Showing at State Library of Queensland,, and Internationally in 2009.
Urban Skinning, Projector-based architectural installation, in VSMM (Virtual Systems and Multimedia), QUT, Brisbane, 2007
Short Stare, Projector-based architectural installation, in International Digital Arts Touring Projects, Zaim Gallery, Yokohama, 2006.
Shark Soup, in International Digital Art Projects (IDAP), Beijing, 2006 (with Joe Bryant)
Unroll, Unfurl, Projector-based architectural installation, QUT Creative Industries Precinct, 2007.
Stand Here, in Eyes, Lies, Illusion, International traveling exhibition from the Hayward Gallery in London, at Australian Centre for the Moving Image (ACMI) invited contemporary Artist, 2006–2007
Digital Songlines, ACID Pictures, Chris Barker director/animator, animated short, 2005.
Bullet Point, Implied Pictures, Chris Barker director/animator, animated short, 2004. (Shown nationally and internationally in festival programs)
Final Notice, animated short, AIM Films, Chris Barker director/animator (winner of the Planet X award for best use of digital media, Melbourne 1999.)

Collaborations:
Pixellated Sea, Collaborative work with Chrissie Parrot, WAPA, Dance and Animation, Produced by QUT Creative Industries.
Sex, Drugs and String Quartets dir. Carla Thackrah, Executive Producer, Mark Chapman, Big Island Pictures, 2003.
Circus Sweet dir. Carla Thackrah, Executive Producer, Mark Chapman, Big Island Pictures, 2004
Intimate Transactions, dir Keith Armstrong, Transmute Collective, 2003–2004.
Citadel, dir Chris Barker, ACID Production collaboration with Auran Games, 2004.

Supervisor projects

  • Looking Sideways: Perceptual play with colour, light and illusory space
  • 12 Aug 2024
  • Crafting Vietnamese Digital Heritage: Navigating Cultural Hybridity through Interactivity and Extended Reality Design Practice.
  • 13 May 2024
  • Found Sound as Play: Integrating practices of listening as gameplay to enable place making
  • 20 Jul 2021
  • Miniature Materialities
  • 10 Jul 2020
  • The Depth Object. Exploring Non-naturalistic Spatial Composition in Stereoscopic Virtual Reality
  • 11 Jul 2019
  • Making Place: Mediated Attention in Expanded Landscape Photography
  • 6 Jun 2019
  • The Plausible Impossible - Unpacking the constituents of embodied animation performance.
  • 27 May 2019
  • Volumetric Light Sculptures: Occupying the Space Between the Apparatus and the Image
  • 12 Feb 2018
  • Refiguring Animated Bodies: Feminist Perspectives on the Body in Animation
  • 2 Mar 2015

Teaching interests

Animation studies, interactive media, tangible media, photogrammetry, anamorphosis, digital projections, urban screen studies, networked media, performance research, practice-led research.

Research interests

Visual Arts and Crafts, Film, Television and Digital Media, Distributed Computing, Information Systems, Ecology, Artificial Intelligence and Image Processing

Research and scholarship
Animation Studies
Human-Computer Interaction
l Heritage
Creative Entrepreneurship
New Media Art
aboriginal flag
torres strait flag

Acknowledgement of Country

RMIT University acknowledges the people of the Woi wurrung and Boon wurrung language groups of the eastern Kulin Nation on whose unceded lands we conduct the business of the University. RMIT University respectfully acknowledges their Ancestors and Elders, past and present. RMIT also acknowledges the Traditional Custodians and their Ancestors of the lands and waters across Australia where we conduct our business - Artwork 'Sentient' by Hollie Johnson, Gunaikurnai and Monero Ngarigo.