Begin forwarded message:
> From:
twsherma@mailbox.syr.edu> Date: Sat Jun 7, 2003 9:46:48 PM US/Eastern
>
> Subject: Molyneaux review of Sherman's I-Bomb book
>
>
> "Before and After the I-Bomb: an artist in the information environment"
> by Tom Sherman, edited by Peggy Gale, Banff Centre Press 2002,
> ISBN 0-920159-94-X; 6.5 x 8.25, 384 pages, paper: $29.95 CDN / $20.50
> US
>
> A review by Dr. Brian Leigh Molyneaux
>
>
> Tom Sherman's "Before and After the I-Bomb", a collection of more than
> twenty-five years of public and private muses, performance texts and
> internet pieces, represents a lifetime's seduction by technology.
>
> Sherman makes his passion clear at the outset. He likes to "negotiate
> reality with instruments". This is not a surprise for someone born
> immediately after World War II. Sherman's earliest childhood was a time
> when the masses were encouraged not only to fear the A-Bomb and its
> technology but to love it as a protector. Many kids born in the
> aftermath
> of World War II were like Tom and me. Deep in blue collar/middle class
> North America and wary of protection, we pressed our ears against the
> speakers of vast old radios, moving through fantastic jungles of noise
> in
> search of distant, dangerous new worlds. We grew up, of course, and
> lost
> our naivety during the VietNam war era, but we remained faithful to
> technology as a vehicle for exploration and enchantment.
>
> Sherman's first public act of techno-seduction was a subversive reverie
> for a British communications journal that he published in 1974. His
> modest
> proposal was to process Western art history into a "concise history of
> painting" and create an Art-Style Computer-Processing System so that
> television viewers could translate broadcasts in the "period vision" of
> their choice ('let's watch the State of the Union address as Surrealism
> tonight, dear'). Between this early bravura - 1974 was also the year of
> the first personal computer - and his twenty-first century Epilogue, a
> somber reflection on our current "techno-existentialism", he provides
> an
> artist's perspective on the I-bomb. The I-bomb stands for the
> "thunderous
> explosion of advertising, entertainment, voice and data" that heralded
> the
> late twentieth century information age. What makes this book essential
> reading for anyone interested in contemporary art and society is that
> Sherman saw the bomb develop, got caught in the blast, and has a strong
> vision of the world in its wake.
>
> Sherman's narratives begin in a 1970s Toronto still resonating from
> Marshall McLuhan's radical ideas about mass media. McLuhan's notion
> that
> electronic media extended the central nervous system outside the body
> into
> "a global embrace" had an especially strong impact on people already
> mulling over Norbert Weiner's cybernetic theory. Weiner held that the
> dynamics of communication and control were similar for humans, other
> living things, and machines. Unconventional artists like Sherman saw
> this
> new way of thinking as a challenge not only to contemporary art, but
> also
> to traditional ideas of human nature. While realtime communication
> devices
> eliminated the distance between people and vastly increased their web
> of
> relationships, it did so at the sacrifice of a body-centered mind. In
> various places in the I-bomb we read his complaint: "I worry about
> losing
> my sense of self"; "my nervous system is not so central anymore". By
> 2002,
> the courtship is over: "we are embracing technology itself as the
> significant other in our lives".
>
> The vision of a new bionic nature emerging out of the disembodiments of
> the information age is not simply an intellectual conceit. The
> integration
> of human and machine through multimedia extensions poses a threat to
> the
> balance of nature. The problem is that this new adaptation is largely
> untested. Nature had millions of years to sort out primate development
> and
> create human animals well adapted to their natural environments. Since
> the
> new information age has developed so quickly, it has become a
> cybernetic
> problem, a world out of control. So, while the internet seems to be
> moving
> us ever closer to McLuhan's ideal of the global village, we are not
> only
> being "overrun by our own technological inventions", as Sherman writes,
> but running ahead of our own evolution! The result is a chaos of
> choices,
> like the fantastic array of experimental creatures produced millions of
> years ago in early Cambrian seas near the origins of life. In Sherman's
> words
>
> "There is no collective idea of where we are headed. The future is
> multidirectional. With no collective vision, the individual is at the
> center of the universe again".
>
> Such obvious disquiet at social fragmentation may seem odd coming from
> an
> artist. Sherman knows, however, that the freedom that technology gives
> to
> individual expression comes at a price: the architectures of software,
> hardware and delivery systems are logical, highly structured and under
> corporate control. No wonder videocams and computers are "the preferred
> tools of authoritative organizations". In the techno-environment, we
> are
> reduced to the level of our primate ancestors, feeding an information
> economy, and "harvested like trees or minerals or fish". The effect of
> this expanding multimedia world on creativity is clear, as anyone
> thinking
> about the pathetically narrow window of their monitor must surely
> realize:
> "Industrially produced architectures of thought generate imaginative
> uniformity", making change, over time, "the same as endless
> uniformity".
> We cannot escape our memes any more than we can our genes.
>
> Sherman is always concerned with his own engagement with a world where
> nature and culture, animal and machine, are all part of integrated
> information systems. It is perhaps inevitable, then, that he devotes
> the
> last part of the book to our problematic relationship with the natural
> world - symbolized, in the last sentence in the closing text, by the
> disturbing image of a manicured cedar tree in a Burger King entrance -
> Nature firmly under capitalist technological control. While some
> readers
> might assume that his clear love for the vicissitudes of nature is
> simply
> nostalgia for a living system that worked, he clarifies his view in the
> Epilogue. We are stuck with what we helped create; Nature is now our
> responsibility.
>
> Sherman's resolution is elusive, even evasive: cracks of light, hope,
> memory, novelty. There is clearly no easy way out of our dystopia. In
> my
> reading, however, there is refuge and inspiration in a subtle bit of
> text
> that may reveal Sherman's personal approach. In "Nothing Worse"
> (2000), we
> find his persona in his artistic hermitage, the man who does not want
> to
> move.
>
> "If you want to go with the flow, you've got to be streamlined;
> you've got to be smooth.
>
> I don't fit in. The world spins around me. Everything I touch
> seems
> to stop in its tracks. I get ideas. I move on these ideas. I make
> things.... Somewhere, out there, there are other people who sit still
> and
> watch the world spin around. They are like me. They, too, make
> information
> that doesn't move."
>
> Franz Kafka wrote: "the fact that our task is exactly commensurate with
> our life gives it the appearance of being infinite" (Third Notebook,
> January 19, 1918). Sherman's best writing - simple, lucid description,
> contrived and yet free, paced at the rhythm of an ordinary
> conversation -
> conveys the simple beauty and dreadful wonder that are the contraries
> of
> life in a technological maelstrom. If we are to survive the effects of
> the
> I-bomb, perhaps we too need to stop, take a few breaths, look away from
> our monitors and listen.
>
> -----
>
> Dr. Brian Leigh Molyneaux <
moly@usd.edu> is an archaeologist, writer
> and
> photographer. He is a specialist in art and ideology, the human use of
> the
> landscape, and environmental approaches to technology. At the
> University
> of South Dakota, he is Director of the Archaeology Laboratory, and
> Co-Director of the Missouri River Institute. He is also a Research
> Associate of the Royal Ontario Museum, Toronto, Canada. He received
> his MA
> in Art and Archaeology from Trent University, Peterborough, Ontario, in
> 1977 and his PhD in Archaeology at the University of Southampton,
> England
> in 1991.
>
> -----
>
> Tom Sherman's book, "Before and After the I-Bomb: An Artist in the
> Information Environment," is available through Printed Matter, Inc.; or
> directly from the Banff Centre Press.
>
> Individuals can order via the WWW from Printed Matter, Inc.:
>
http://www.printedmatter.org/>
> To order directly from the Banff Centre Press, send an e-mail to:
>
press@banffcentre.ca -- or call 403-762-7532
>
> This book is also available on-line at:
www.amazon.com,
www.amazon.ca,
>
www.barnesandnoble.com,
www.borders.com,
www.artmetropole.com,
>
www.chapters.ca/>
> Bookstores or libraries should contact:
> LPG Distribution
> c/o 100 Armstrong Ave
> Georgetown, ON L7G 5S4
> Tel: 905-877-4411 toll-free 800-591-6250
> Fax: 905-877-4410 toll-free 800-591-6251
> Email:
orders@lpg.ca>
> [note: bookstores in the U.S. can order through Ingram and Baker &
> Taylor]
>