Tom Sherman – Before and after the I-Bomb

Tom Sherman

book – The Banff Centre Press – ISBN 092015994X
A long personal journey through the media mutation of the end of the Seventies to the dawn of the new millennium, describing a natural visionary nature, consequence of an artistic obsession for video and the messages immaterially transported by it. The digital nature of the processes, the narrative and the media is revealed again through a daily reflection, even if sometimes expressed with excessive irrefutability or ill-concealed irony. The communication systems are analyzed in their skeleton of relationships, collaborations and intrusions, with their plethora of ‘calculated manipulations’. They often are short texts, with a style resembling that of editorials, well orchestrated in their mix of imagination and singular use of language to shred one’s conscience and produce brilliant illuminations in a constantly feeded awareness of mechanisms. A text which, if read with a little detachment and a lot of attention can complete one’s personal choice of intuitions lost in the flow of adapted, crated and distorted concepts. Just like in one of the most brilliant reflections, which can be recursively applied to the text and the matter treated: “Now we are able to ‘negotiate’ the continuous output”.