This 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."

1. SUB/EXTROS (1), 2001, 5:00 mins, Tom Sherman in collaboration with Christian Science Minotaur (CSM) and Bernhard Loibner.

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.

2. HALF/LIVES, 2001, 07:37 mins
Tom Sherman in collaboration with Christian Science Minotaur (CSM) and Bernhard Loibner.

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.

2. SUB/EXTROS (2), 2001, 5:00 mins

3. SUB/EXTROS (3), 2001, 5:00 mins