T H E P O I N T O F C O N TACT GA L L E RY
TOM SHERMAN Meditations ON VIDEO (&) LANGUAGE
Architecture of Memory pencil, paper, photographed and printed, 1988
TOM SHERMAN
Meditations ON VIDEO (&) LANGUAGE OCTOBER 25, 2012 - NOVEMBER 30, 2012 Curated by Pedro Cuperman This exhibit at The Point of Contact Gallery in Syracuse, New York, is made possible thanks to the generous support of Nancy Cantor, Chancellor of Syracuse University, Vice Chancellor Eric Spina, Dean George Langford of the College of Arts & Sciences, Dean Ann Clarke, of the College of Visual & Performing Arts, The Department of Transmedia, College of Visual and Performing Arts, and the New York State Council on the Arts. Our sincere gratitude also to Jeffrey Hoone, Executive Director of the Coalition of Museum & Art Centers at Syracuse University.
The Point of Contact Gallery is a member of the Coalition of Museum and Art Centers at Syracuse University (CMAC).
Still from Before Letting Go video, 6 minutes 40 seconds, 2004
Still from The Appearance of Voice video, 5 minutes, 2004
A Conversation with Tom Sherman Pedro Cuperman The Point of Contact Gallery Syracuse, NY October 1st, 2012
Pedro: The 1940s and 50s established the phenomenological framework. You actualize this in your video work and now it becomes a kind of philosophical retrospective, the notion of reflection. Would you agree? Tom: We can begin there. Pedro: One of the interesting things I found in your essay, Video as a Perceptual Prosthetic, is the opposition you establish between the individual and the group, something that those who worked on phenomenology during the 40s and 50s didn’t do: Husserl, and then Sartre, among others. They were always thinking about an individual’s consciousness. But you bring into the discussion a kind of collective consciousness where you insert video as a catalyst of a collective expansion of perception. So really, the novelty of your thinking is that video permits us to expand traditional phenomenology by including what you call a collective perceptual conscience. By assuming a collective experience that can be seen and shared by many, video is filling a gap by expanding our consciousness and knowledge. Am I on the right track? Tom: It’s interesting what you are saying. I think that part of the beauty of video is that its form, as a platform of communication, determines the user’s ability to share with remarkable articulateness and fidelity, a detailed and precise point of view so fluidly. Throughout my work I tend to focus on the tension between the individual’s perception and what is engineered by society. When I was developing as an artist in the 1970s, we used video independently to resist and deconstruct mass media because there was a blanket of suffocating conformity that was being imposed by a rigid instruction set characterizing mass media, a control structure that was designed by governments and by commercial enterprises. We saw the mass
Ideogrammatic Obsession pencil, photograph on paper, 1988
media’s role as the imposition of conformist behavior, the distribution of a kind of roboticism. Pedro: Are you suggesting that video is not an imposition that influences one’s thinking? I mean, what you say, and I agree completely, is that technological media imposes a point of view. But now I am using the phenomenological tradition, which is that there is no such thing as a world in itself or that thing in itself. The subject, perceptually, constitutes the world, so if you are utilizing this methodology, you must assume that video is really constituting the world, that more or less there is no such thing as a world in itself at the common level, but there is a constitution of the world—and video, in one way or another, somehow parallels the operation of consciousness, liberating instead of being an imposition. Tom: I think the best way for me to continue my line of thought is to say that historically we were trying to break down or puncture that collective mask that was being placed on us through mass media, but what happened is that there was a reversal or inversion that occurred, where we were given the ability to make our own statements in the medium of video. Before video emerged from the devolution of television, making statements in video had previously been restricted to governments and commercial enterprises. But when this inversion happened, another type of roboticism was imposed, and that was a roboticism that engineered the breakdown of the collective, a roboticism that advocated open access and the freedom of interactivity. So now we have gone through a transformation, a point of fundamental inversion. I would say this took place in the early 1980s, when corporations like Sony gave us prosumer technology, a technology that would not just read or respond or reproduce the overall methodology of mass media, but instead, it allowed us to make our own media. We were given the tools of the professional consumer, and became the user that made his or her own programming. The World Wide Web and all of these interactive technologies, including the emergence of smart phones, etc., is the institution of this freedom, of this ability for the individual to make and transmit his or her own messages. Or for small groups of people to interact through
Still from Hyperventilation 2011 video, 9 minutes, 2011
media, which is a completely different problem now that we don’t have a common collective consciousness engineered by mass media. The iPhone is atomizing our cultures to a great extent, to the point where we now are left with this problem of how to communicate with individuals that do not have a collective idea of what is going on, and I think unfortunately that’s left us with a sort of ideogrammatic obsession and that ideogrammatic obsession is that there are only so many small things that we can say symbolically, and of course the free floating signifiers are everywhere these days… Pedro: And you say this was imposed by the technology? The technology imposes its own borders and limitations? Tom: Yes, I’m a determinist in that respect. I think that technology is a language, a firm, rigid form of language. Software exists between wetware, firmware and hardware. Technology is a manifestation of language, and it’s designed by people, by engineers to have a sense of utility, and in the process of producing that utility, their language, their technology defines its own conventions in terms of the way people act and communicate. Pedro: But you wouldn’t say that technology is a mind? Tom: No, I won’t go that far. Pedro: Perhaps it’s not even a language. Perhaps it’s a…border, a cognitive set of borders, a tool that allows us to access the world. Tom: To make it clearer. Pedro: Yes. Tom: Well I’m sure you know the argument that video isn’t just a tool, but that it’s a medium, which is broader in its sensibility and potential. I’m looking at video as an instrument, and I’m thinking of it as an instrument like a telescope or a microscope.
Still from Declarations video, 5 minutes, 2004
That societal question that you asked in terms of the possible innovations that might extend the limits of phenomenological perception from the 1940s and 50s, the ubiquity of video and its ability of its users to be in two places at the same time or in many places, all of those relationships, one to many, one to one, many to one, many to many--all of those relationships in terms of communication… Video creates the ability for the individual to exist with a consciousness that spreads out like a veil that goes over the broader society. It’s not a question of extending the ego. It’s simply the reality of sharing one’s consciousness at the speed of light, to naturally emanate the image and sounds of an electronic consciousness. Pedro: That’s the contribution. Tom: That’s the contribution the instrument allows us to make, and therefore the image that the person then portrays of reality. The representation may be best described as a constellation of moments of awareness. It’s impossible to summarize in words what you think in a video, but it is possible to create a constellation of a series of mediated statements that contribute to the aggregate consciousness of a society, like a transparent veil of perceptual events, of a shared subconscious. In phenomenological terms the individual consciousness is no longer bound by isolation. Existentialism must be redefined. We are alone, together. We cannot avoid the distribution, the sharing of our consciousness. That’s the fundamental transformation of the late 20th century and it is washing onto the shores of the 21st.
Still from Talking to Nature video, 3 minutes, 2002
Artist Bio Tom Sherman is Professor of Art Video in the Department of Transmedia at Syracuse University. Sherman is an artist and writer. He works primarily in video, performance and radio. He was a founding co-editor of Fuse magazine, Toronto (1980); founding director of Media Arts for the Canada Council for the Arts, Ottawa (1983-87), and co-founder of Nerve Theory, an international performance art/recording collaborative (1997). In 1980, he represented Canada at the Venice Biennale, and in 1986 was appointed international commissioner for the groundbreaking “Art, Technology and Informatics” exhibition at the Venice Biennale. Among numerous distinctions, Sherman received the Bell Canada prize for excellence in video art in 2003, and Canada’s Governor General’s Award in Visual and Media Arts in 2010.
Still from The Amateur Scientist video, 6 minutes, 2012
Integrated Circuit video tape on aluminum panel, 1990-2012
Still from Alley 9 (with Jan Pottie) video, 27 minutes 30 seconds, 2009
Still from Wrestling with language video, 56 minutes, 2008
Sleepingrobot paint on aluminum panel, 1987
THE
POINT
OF
CONTACT
GALLERY
914 East Genesee Street, Syracuse, NY 13210 • Tel. 315.443.2169
www.puntopoint.org
director & curator Pedro Cuperman managing director Tere Paniagua assistant administrator Bailey Pfohl public relations & marketing assistant Patricio Vaisman graphic design Anna Sofía Font web development Matthew Les
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