Tom Sherman

From IntegratedMedia

Tom Sherman is an artist and writer who works across numerous media including video, audio, performance and print. He is currently a Professor in the Department of Transmedia at Syracuse University, New York.

1 Biography
2 Aesthetic Style
3 Research
4 Writing
5 Video Productions
6 Projects
7 Interview with Tom Sherman
8 writing and/or pieces
9 Before and After the I Bomb
10 External References

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Biography

Born in Manistee, Michigan in 1947 and graduating in 1970 with a Bachelor of Fine Art from Eastern Michigan University, Tom Sherman is now globally celebrated and recognised for his work as a visual artist in the 21st Century and the information society. In 2003 he won the Canada Council's Bell Canada Award for excellence in video art. That however is not the least of his achievements.

Dates to Remember:

1974 Sherman begins publishing his work as visual objects and in video performance
1973 Founded A-space Video
1974 Founded Fuse Magazine
1988-1989 Worked to develop a research institute: the Centre for Image and Sound Research in Vancouver.
1991 Appointed director of the School of Art and Design at Syracuse University in Syracuse, New York
1986 Made international commissioner for the Art, Technology and informatics exhibition in the central Italian pavilion of the Venice Biennale.
2003 Receive the Canada Council for the Art’s Bell Canada Award for excellence
2005 Premiere of Nerve Theory. Nerve Theory is a performance group Sherman founded with Bernhard Loibner.

Sherman regularly writes for journals and periodicals. His most recent book: Before and After the I-Bomb: An Artist in the Information Environment is an analogy of his writing over the past 20 years.

Currently Sherman works as a professor at Syracuse University. He teaches video productions and media history and theory. Though he splits his time between Syracuse and Nova Scotia in Canada he remains active in the media production environment.

His writings suggest that he is concerned for the shift towards electronic media and the dependence on the information world. In recent articles and in Nerve Theory performances he discusses the loss of nature and the rise of chaos in our society. There is also his work on Vernacular Video, where he discusses the production of short, sharp video as the preferred way for future communication; Vernacular Video can and is being used to capture the loss of art culture and the rise of art-chaos.

Sherman's studies now focus on the culture shift and the loss of the artist in the information age. His research focuses on how to maintain independence and creatively in the explosion of video and audio production as a common medium to discuss and communicate online, both officially and socially.

Extreme sports, sex, self-mutilation and drug overdoses will mix with disaster culture; terrorist attacks, plane crashes, hurricanes and tornadoes will be translated into mediated horror through vernacular video." Yeah man! Bring the noise!

Sherman emphasises the importance of Transmedia, where he believes artists must not limit the medium they are dealing with because what always determines media is the environment, not the artists themselves. He argues that artists need to interact with environment, drive them with content, and search for opportunities to communicate with audiences thus Considering transmedia approach would help establishing presence in our local and global media environment

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Aesthetic Style

Sherman explains the characteristics of Vernacular Video as a recombination of sampling and repeat structure video clip like collage and montage, where voice over and dynamic on screen text, crude animation/behaviour, slow motion and digital effect are frequently used. Tom argues that this would result in proliferation of personal video diaries and site journalism.

Being a productive media worker himself, in recent years Tom Sherman has been working on video art that is distinct from mainstream video clips. He sometimes uses continuous shots and rarely uses any cuts in a whole clip. Sometimes he uses seemingly totally irrelevant visual footage, narration and background soundtracks to establish his ideas. Interestingly enough, Tom Sherman is more often than not the Voice-of-God behind the scene.[1]

In his 2005 clip: 'The Face is the Logo of the Human Body',Tom Sherman documents his research in different types of faces all around the world as well as explaining the uses of features on a face that express the person's personality. The style of this documentary seems traditional, but the topic that Sherman chooses is somewhat unusual.

In another 2006 clip called "BrainFingerprinting", Tom Sherman narrates his idea of this new science scene as he shows a long clip of a carapace insect on its back struggling to get on its feet. With detective-style background music ,this documentary clip that might be categorized as 'serious' somehow seems to resemble a parody. Probably this is Tom Sherman's way of playing with the audiences' minds and eyes?

In Tom's video clip, bugs frequently appear. That's what he observes as an art form as he is interested in although some people might think it's odd.

creative commons license Courtesy of Phil h.

creative commons license Courtesy of denis collette

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Research

Tom Sherman is the president and chief executive officer of WordWatch Systems, creators of an audio recording system which analyses the spoken language. WordWatch is a consulting firm focused on understanding our cultural and business development through our change in language. Installed into boardrooms, WordWatch collects data and then looks for the linguistic patterns which develop. In a recent study the buzz words were: interactivity, compatibility and creativity. (Before and after the I-Bomb, page 18-19)

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Writing

Having worked with video and related media since 1970, Tom has established himself as a prominent video artist. In 1974 he began writing in order to extend his concept-based work into publications[2]. He is the founding co-editor of Fuse Magazine, an 'arts and culture magazine for readers in need of in-depth coverage of innovative and alternative art practices'.

As Tom explains, his work often originates in a written form, before being 'translated and embedded in electronic media and distributed via networks or in live performance'.

Tom's written work covers a wide range of texts, ranging from the historical and theoretical to the fictional and poetic. His contributions as a writer feature across a wide range of media, including books, magazines, weblogs and listservs. Central themes in Tom’s writing include video art history, artists' practices in the information age, information theory, the economics of information and attention and discussion of art and the history of art across the mediums of video and radio[3].

He is currently writing a series of texts focusing on the phenomena of contemporary messaging. Looking at our mass immersion in cultural networks such as Myspace, Facebook, youtube and other communication trends such as text messaging, Tom is studying the cultural change in behaviour that is occurring.

Three pieces of writing by Tom that are particularly relevant to our study of integrated media are Before and after the I-Bomb: An artist in the information environment (2002), Three Texts on Video, published in Canadian Art Magazine (2005), and Vernacular Video (2007).

Tom's Vernacular Video is what Integrated Media One students at RMIT will be considering when presenting their manifesto, an interactive video piece to be completed for assessment.

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Video Productions

Tom Sherman @ Video vortex conference, 2008

creative commons license Courtesy of dominick.chen

Tom giving presentation at video vortex conference, Amsterdam, 2008.

creative commons license Courtesy of Anne Helmond

Sherman has said, "Video is a liquid, shimmering, ubiquitous medium that absorbs everything it touches. This liquidity makes video synonymous with intermedia, the art of filling the gaps between media. Today’s media culture and media art are composed of complex, hybrid forms of multi-sensory information. Nothing is very pure and one-dimensional these days. In fact, making video is like talking. In its essence it occurs in real time, permitting our minds to run ahead of the moment. Video is intimate and immediate (quick as light), and it is positively inclusive. Video will be at the heart of all forms of digital telecom in the near future. Video (intermedia) fills all the spaces between the arts today."

Sherman has been working with video since 1970. Between 1976-78 he was a writer for the TVOntario network, producing some of the first music videos shown on that network. In 1980 his work represented Canada at the Venice Biennale, and in 2003 he won the Bell Canada Award in Video Art. Many of his video productions contain images accompanying his own voice-overs, and his work is often pre-occupied with animals and insects intersecting and traversing with man-made objects like buildings and roads. His productions Gannet Burial (1999) and Spiders (1990) in particular exemplify these interactions. Other films, such as Envisioner, (1978) feature voice-over that largely mimics typed text that appears in the film. Sherman himself often appears in his video productions. Editing is often jumpy (especially where the camera is hand-held), and cuts sometimes appear to bear little relation to each other. Some images in his video works only last a second or two and appear incongruous and random. In 2006, Sherman said, “The potential of video as a decentralized communications tool for the masses has been realized, and the 21st century will be remembered as the video age. Surveillance and countersurveillance aside, video is the vernacular form of the era — it is the common and everyday way that people communicate. Video is the way people place themselves at events and describe what happened. In existential terms, video has become everyperson’s POV (point of view). It is an instrument for framing existence and identity.” His video production can be seen at Vtape.
Read more on Video Art
Read more on Vernacular Video

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Projects

Tom focuses on developing and maintaining an independent, creative voice in an information environment that is getting more and more hysterical to anomaly, eccentricity and difference. Currently his work with Nerve Theory explores his specific interests in viral analogies and global surveillance of the bird flu,H5N1 virus, stating its potential contribution to world fear thus resulting anxiety in a wide view of mediated communication.

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Interview with Tom Sherman

We were unable to conduct an interview with Tom Sherman due to his busy teaching schedule, but we have recreated interview questions and have speculated upon Tom's answers based on our research. Read our hypothetical interview with Tom.

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writing and/or pieces

Blanking is an essay on information overload and how it affects us. We are addicted to connectivity so much that we drive ourselves to a point of constant noise, interaction and activity so that eventually our body has no choice but to shut down.

Jellyfish Chronicals This essay demonstrates well one of Tom Sherman's less explicit but equally as strong interests: nature. In his book Before and After the I Bomb, a whole section is dedicated to his experiences with nature and his views on the destruction of it.

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Before and After the I Bomb

Find our page dedicated to a summary of Tom Sherman's essay collection here: Before and After the I Bomb: An artist in the Information Environment (2002) Tom Sherman, edited by Peggy Gale

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