Video by artists, vernacular video, video art history, audio art and radio by artists, performance art, artists' behavior in the 21st century; information theory, cybernetics, the economics of information and attention, gift economies; the media ecology, biological life (especially insects and birds), viruses and microbes (as biological species and in analogies); person-machine relationships, surveillance culture, social networks, cultural engineering, contemporary messaging;  rural cultural phenomena.

My current research focuses on developing and maintaining an independent, creative voice in an information environment increasingly hostile to anomaly, eccentricity and difference. I work as an artist and writer across a wide spectrum of media: video, audio, radio, performance, books, magazines, weblogs and listservs. At the center of my work is the formulation of a wide range of texts, some didactic, historical and theoretical, some fictional and poetic. These texts are largely generated in written form before being embedded in electronic media and distributed via networks or in live performance.

I continue to work on performance work based on my interests in viral analogies, specifically working in tandem with global surveillance of the H5N1 and H1N1 viruses, observing and issuing statements on their potential as a pandemic viruses approaching the magnitude of the historic H1N1 pandemic, the Spanish influenza, which killed as many as 40 million worldwide from 1918-1920. The potential H5N1 pandemic and the actual H1N1 pandemic of 2009 contribute to a global culture of fear, stirred by terrorism, the war on terror, the resulting erosion of privacy and civil liberties, and the crush of anxiety generated in a broad spectrum of mediated communication.

In addition to this viral work, I continue writing about the perceptual consequences of contemporary messaging, a study of cultural shifts in behavior resulting from mass immersions in cultural networks (text messaging, MySpace, Facebook, YouTube). This research in contemporary messaging is based in surveillance techniques, data-mining, facial recognition systems, automated pattern recognition, voice prints and brain scanning, observations of submissive extroversion and analogies involving sociobiology.

I am developing and exhibiting silent video projection works investigating the visual languages of human and non-human species. In 2008 I completed two video projection works: Natures, a two-channel projection, silent, 43 minutes; and Wrestling with language, a single-channel projection, silent, 56 minutes. These silent video compositions are based on strings of video files, each file a discrete, complete phrase of recorded motion. When these motion phrases are strung together in sequences, they cause viewers to think from phrase to phrase, through chains of analogies. This is a generative, transformational descriptive visual language of motion and pattern. Content is important (the way an animal moves, or how a pair of professional wrestlers tangle...), but these strings of video files are constructed for a particular kind of continuous, analogous visual thinking. Serial analogies run on and stack up until there is a break down in the composition or in the consciousness of the viewer. Duration is important. The viewer can decide to walk away, but these particular compositions will never permit the viewer to run out of images. In this way these video projection works are reminiscent of the relentless supply (flow) of images on television.

In 2009 I am refocusing on contemporary rural cultural phenomena, making video documents of karaoke, drag racing and pro-amateur fashion photography in Queens County, Nova Scotia.  This rural documentation continues my work covering webcam communications, high school proms, shark fishing derbies, small-town political rallies, girls tackle football, professional wrestling, high school rock bands and landscape and portrait videography in both rural and urban contexts (33 video titles since 1999).

www.kunstradio.at/2006A/H5N1en.html
www.formatlabor.net/blog/?p=73
www.fondation-langlois.org/html/e/page.php?NumPage=1969
myownprivatereality.wordpress.com/2007/06/06/tom-sherman-essay-full-text/
newsgrist.typepad.com/underbelly/2007/01/the_premature_b.html
www.banffcentre.ca/press/publications/ibomb.asp
www.discordia.us/scoop/special/eadobbs/index4f36.html?eaid=17
www.ottawaartgallery.ca/exhibits/2002/maxdean/symposium2002-en.php  
neoscenes.net/hyper-text/text/third/sherman.html
www.noemalab.org/sections/ideas/ideas_articles/sherman_memory.html

"Vernacular Video (expanded version)," in Video Vortex Reader, ed. Geert Lovink, Institute of Network Cultures, Amsterdam, Netherlands, September 2008.


"Enduring Messages: Are Microcommunications an Art Form?," in Canadian Art, Toronto, Ontario, Vol. 25, Number 3, Fall 2008.

"Blanking," in Re-Inventing Radio: Aspects of Radio as Art, edited by Heidi Grundmann, Elisabeth Zimmermann, Reinhard Braun, Dieter Daniels, Andreas Hirsch, Ann Thurmann-Jajes, Revolver (Frankfort, Germany), 2008, pp. 48-51.

"Vernacular Video," in the "Contemporary filmmaking and the Soviet avant-garde" issue of Chto Delat?, Issue #18, St. Petersburg, Russia; Dresden, Germany (ed. Dmitry Vilensky), October 2007.

"Cinematic video: while film is dying, 'film' is being born," in Indie Slate, issue #46, Houston, Texas, November 2006.

"Vernacular Video," in Les Fleurs du Mal, issue #2, Montreal, Quebec, September 2006.

"Flying in the Face of Abundance and Redundance," in Canadian Art, Toronto, Ontario, Volume 23, No. 2, Summer 2006.

"Video/Intermedia/Animation," in The Sharpest Point: Animation at the End of Cinema, edited by Chris Gehman and Steve Reinke, YYZ Books (Toronto, Ontario) 2005.

"Once Living in a Healthy State of Paranoia" (with images by Robin Collyer), in Impulse Archaeology, edited by Eldon Garnet, University of Toronto Press (Toronto, Ontario) Summer 2005, pp. 34-35.

"Three Texts on Video," in Canadian Art (Toronto, Ontario), Volume 22, Number 1, Spring 2005.

"Artists' Behaviour in the First Decade," in Accounting for Culture: Thinking through Cultural Citizenship, edited by Caroline Andrew, Monica Gattinger, M. Sharon Jeannotte and Will Straw, University of Ottawa (Ottawa, Ontario), March 2005.

"The Appearance of Voice," in Sound in Contemporary Canadian Art, Editions Artexte (Montreal), edited by Nicole Gingras, February 2004.

"Millennial Spurn," in Public (Toronto), edited by Deborah Root and Dot Tuer, June 2003.

"Always Nice to Be Recognized," in Fuse (Toronto), edited by Richard Hill, October 2002.

"On the influence of Jack Chambers," in The films of Jack Chambers, Cinematheque Ontario (Toronto), in conjunction with Indiana University Press (Bloomington/Indianapolis), edited by Kathryn Elder, 2002.

Before and After the I-Bomb: An Artist in the Information Environment, Peggy Gale, ed., Banff Centre Press (Banff, Alberta), May 2002.