COLLEGE OF VISUAL
AND PERFORMING ARTS | SYRACUSE UNIVERSITY
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Tom Sherman

Professor •
Profile | Work Samples

Education
BFA, Eastern Michigan University 1970
Post-graduate equivalent: A Space, Toronto 1972-75 (video coordinator and gallery director for one of the first artist-run centers in North America)

Brief Biography
Founding co-editor of Fuse magazine, Toronto, 1980; represented Canada at the Venice Biennale 1980; founding Head of Media Arts section of the Canada Council for the Arts, Ottawa 1983-87; international commissioner for Venice Biennale 1986; appointed director of the School of Art and Design, Syracuse University 1991; co-founded Nerve Theory, an international performance art/recording collaborative 1997; awarded the Bell Canada prize for excellence in video art 2003.

Research and Teaching Interests
Video by artists, vernacular video, video art history, audio art and radio by artists, performance art, artists' behavior in the 21st century; information theory, cybernetics, the economics of information and attention, gift economies; the media ecology, biological life (especially insects and birds), viruses and microbes (as biological species and in analogies); person-machine relationships, surveillance culture, social networks, cultural engineering, and the phenomena of contemporary messaging.

Current Research
My current research focuses on developing and maintaining an independent, creative voice in an information environment increasingly hostile to anomaly, eccentricity and difference. I work as an artist and writer across a wide spectrum of media: video, audio, radio, performance, books, magazines, weblogs and listservs. I prefer intermedial and transmedial approaches to interacting with local and international communities of interest. At the center of my work is the formulation of a wide range of texts, some didactic, historical and theoretical, some fictional and poetic. These texts are largely generated in written form before being translated and embedded in electronic media and distributed via networks or in live performance.

I am working on performance work based on my interests in viral analogies, specifically working in tandem with global surveillance of the H5N1 virus, the bird flu, observing and issuing statements on its potential as a pandemic virus approaching the magnitude of the H1N1 virus, the Spanish influenza, which killed as many as 40 million worldwide from 1918-1920. The H5N1 virus, fascinating in itself, contributes to a global culture of fear, stirred by terrorism, the war on terror, the resulting erosion of privacy and civil liberties, and the crush of anxiety generated in a broad spectrum of mediated communication. I conduct much of this research with my longtime performance and recording collaborator, Bernhard Loibner, the Viennese composer and media artist. Our performance art duo, Nerve Theory, will continue to perform and publish this recent H5N1 material in live performances and recordings.

In addition to this viral work, I am writing a series of texts on the phenomena of contemporary messaging, a study of cultural shifts in behavior resulting from mass immersions in cultural networks (text messaging, MySpace, Facebook, YouTube). This research in contemporary messaging is based in surveillance techniques, data-mining, facial recognition systems, automated pattern recognition, voice prints and brain scanning, observations of submissive extroversion and analogies involving sociobiology.

Most recently I am developing and exhibiting silent video projection works investigating the visual languages of human and non-human species. In 2008 I completed two video projection works: Natures, a two-channel projection, silent, 43 minutes; and Wrestling with language, a single-channel projection, silent, 56 minutes. These silent video compositions are based on strings of video files, each file a discrete, complete phrase of recorded motion. When these motion phrases are strung together in sequences, they cause viewers to think from phrase to phrase, through chains of analogies. This is a generative, transformational descriptive visual language of motion and pattern. Content is important (the way an animal moves, or how a pair of professional wrestlers tangle...), but these strings of video files are constructed for a particular kind of continuous, analogous visual thinking. Serial analogies run on and stack up until there is a break down in the composition or in the consciousness of the viewer. Duration is important. The viewer can decide to walk away, but these particular compositions will never permit the viewer to run out of images. In this way these video projection works are reminiscent of the relentless supply (flow) of images on television.

Selected Texts in Print

"Vernacular Video (expanded version)," in Video Vortex Reader, ed. Geert Lovink, Institute of Network Cultures, Amsterdam, Netherlands, September 2008.
"Enduring Messages: Are Microcommunications an Art Form?," in Canadian Art, Toronto, Ontario, Vol. 25, Number 3, Fall 2008
"Blanking," in Re-Inventing Radio: Aspects of Radio as Art, edited by Heidi Grundmann, Elisabeth Zimmermann, Reinhard Braun, Dieter Daniels, Andreas Hirsch, Ann Thurmann-Jajes, Revolver (Frankfort, Germany), 2008, pp. 48-51.
"Vernacular Video," in the "Contemporary filmmaking and the Soviet avant-garde" issue of Chto Delat?, Issue #18, St. Petersburg, Russia; Dresden, Germany (ed. Dmitry Vilensky), October 2007.
"Cinematic video: while film is dying, 'film' is being born," in Indie Slate, issue #46, Houston, Texas, November 2006
"Vernacular Video," in Les Fleurs du Mal, issue #2, Montreal, Quebec, September 2006.
"Flying in the Face of Abundance and Redundance," in Canadian Art, Toronto, Ontario, Volume 23, No. 2, Summer 2006.
"Video/Intermedia/Animation," in The Sharpest Point: Animation at the End of Cinema, edited by Chris Gehman and Steve Reinke, YYZ Books (Toronto, Ontario) 2005.
"Once Living in a Healthy State of Paranoia" (with images by Robin Collyer), in Impulse Archaeology, edited by Eldon Garnet, University of Toronto Press (Toronto, Ontario) Summer 2005, pp. 34-35.
"Three Texts on Video," in Canadian Art (Toronto, Ontario), Volume 22, Number 1, Spring 2005.
"Artists' Behaviour in the First Decade," in Accounting for Culture: Thinking through Cultural Citizenship, edited by Caroline Andrew, Monica Gattinger, M. Sharon Jeannotte and Will Straw, University of Ottawa (Ottawa, Ontario), March 2005.
"The Appearance of Voice," in Sound in Contemporary Canadian Art, Editions Artexte (Montreal), edited by Nicole Gingras, February 2004.
"Millennial Spurn," in Public (Toronto), edited by Deborah Root and Dot Tuer, June 2003.
"Always Nice to Be Recognized," in Fuse (Toronto), edited by Richard Hill, October 2002.
"On the influence of Jack Chambers," in The films of Jack Chambers, Cinematheque Ontario (Toronto), in conjunction with Indiana University Press (Bloomington/Indianapolis), edited by Kathryn Elder, 2002.
Before and After the I-Bomb: An Artist in the Information Environment, Peggy Gale, ed., Banff Centre Press (Banff, Alberta), May 2002.
 


Department of Transmedia • Syracuse University
102 Shaffer Art • Syracuse, NY 13224-1210 • tel: 315.443.1033 • fax: 315.443.1303