Tom Sherman

Last Name: 
Sherman
First Name: 
Tom

Tom Sherman is an artist and theorist best known for his media art and writing about person/machine relationships. His work has been exhibited, broadcast and published extensively internationally. Sherman, born and raised in Manistee, Michigan, emigrated to Toronto in 1971. He received a BFA from Eastern Michigan University. Sherman represented Canada at the 1980 Venice Biennale. In 1983 The National Gallery of Canada mounted "Cultural Engineering", a ten-year retrospective of his work. Sherman was an international commissioner for the "Art, Technology and Informatics" section of the 1986 Venice Biennale. In the 1990's his work has been featured in exhibitions at the Museo Nacional Centro de Art Reina Sofia (Madrid), the Vancouver Art Gallery, the Museum of Modern Art (New York), Documenta X (Kassel) and Ars Electronica (Linz), and the Musee d'art moderne de la ville de Paris. Besides his work as an artist and theorist, Sherman has founded/co-founded organizations such as A Space Video (1973, Toronto), Fuse Magazine (1978, Toronto), the Media Arts Section of the Canada Council (1983, Ottawa) and the Centre for Image/Sound Research (1989, Vancouver). He was Director of the School of Art & Design at Syracuse University in New York, USA, from 1991-1996. He is currently an Associate Professor at Syracuse University, teaching video and media theory in its Department of Art Media Studies. Remaining active in video for the past 30 years, Sherman's recent activities have centred on live performance and public and web-based radio. Throughout the 1990's he was a regular contributor to Kunstradio, the weekly radio art program on the Austrian Broadcasting Corporation's national cultural channel. In 1997 he released an audio CD of his voice/music work entitled "Personal Human" in collaboration with composers Jean Piche and Bernhard Loibner. Sherman and Loibner have since formed a performance/recording duo called Nerve Theory (for information on Nerve Theory.