[Nettime-bold] SUB/EXTROS...HALF/LIVES

[Tom Sherman <twsherma@mailbox.syr.edu>]

FOUR NEW VIDSONIC TRACKS FROM TOM SHERMAN
IN COLLABORATION WITH CHRISTIAN SCIENCE MINOTAUR
AND BERNHARD LOIBNER


SUB/EXTROS, Tom Sherman (with Christian Science Minotaur,
and Bernhard Loibner), 2001, three vidsonic tracks, 5+ minutes each.

Sherman has combined the video streams of scores of private webcams with
the music of Christian Science Minotaur, a Brooklyn, NY-based group, and
that of Bernhard Loibner of Vienna, Austria.  This is Sherman's first
collaboration with CSM; Sherman and Loibner have collaborated extensively,
often as the performance and recording duo Nerve Theory.

This new series of vidsonic compositions offers a provocative update on
the state of global personal communication in 2001.  Millennium culture is
virtually synonymous with personal communication as mobile telephony and
wireless computing spread like wildfire.  With faster machines and
line-speed the picture-phone has finally arrived and with it there are new
forms of behaviour and attitude.  Today's webcam operators are
simultaneously pinned down and in control.  The video chat-line is the
domain of submissive extroverts, the "SUB/EXTROS."

-----

HALF/LIVES, Tom Sherman (with Bernhard Loibner) 2001,
6 minutes 45 seconds.

Sherman and Loibner team up on a vidsonic blues track, a stark, moving
picture of long-distance relationships in the millennial era.  The scene
is a global video chat-line, where the personal politics of the gaze are
played out ad infinitum.  Anonymity and falsehoods are underwritten by
explicit self-image.  This is the place where to see and be seen is
everything.  Today's webcam culture makes Sartre's "Being and Nothingness"
read like a documentary.  The strange thing is there's real emotional tone
in the distanced, distorted, muted contact.  Loibner's mix of music and
Sherman's voice drives home the very real loneliness of the halting video
streams.  There's an empty feeling in HALF/LIVES; its the incompleteness
at the core of so many totally wired digital realities.

-----

Tom Sherman's video is distributed by:

Vtape
401 Richmond St. West, Suite 452
Toronto, Ontario M5V 3A8 Canada
tel/416.351.1317, fax/416.351.1509
http://www.vtape.org/contact.htm
e-mail/wandav@vtape.org  or  chrisak@vtape.org  

-----

For further information on the artists:

Tom Sherman and Bernhard Loibner:  www.allquiet.org
Christian Science Minotaur:  www.littlefurythings.com/




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