Biography

Tom Sherman is an artist and theorist currently living in Syracuse, New York, USA, where he is Director of Syracuse University´s School of Art & Design. Sherman is best known for his video art and writing about person/machine relationships. In 1981, with his video "Transvideo", he described and critiqued the "information superhighway" in considerable detail. In 1983 he published "Cultural Engineering", a comprehensive examination of the conflicts between the individual and state in a democracy held together by electronic media. The same year he founded the Media Arts Section of the Canada Council, Canada´s federal agency for support of the arts. Troughout the 1990´s Sherman has continued his experiments with voice and image recognition systems and he has spent a lot of time and energy talking to machines as an end itselfs. Recently he has been a frequent on-air contributor to Kunstradio, a radio art program aired by the ORF, the Austrian Broadcasting Corporation.

Quotes

Tom Sherman
Nature is Perverse Sometimes

"This absence of "nature's in trouble" memes on the Net can be explained in a number of ways. People living in cyberspace are largely urban creatures, their natural environments have been covered by concrete and asphalt for so long, their air has always been blue-gray with exhaust fumes, they don't count the natural environment when they take stock of their quality of life. Nature, for the urbanite, is The Body and the body is thought of a discrete biological universe for limited sensual awareness and reproduction. For most networked urban intellectuals, the body is the necessary site of the mind - nothing more, nothing less."