Paul Sermon

(Oxford, London, 1966)

Media art artist. He graduated in Fine Arts from the University of Wales. Since the early 1990s, his experimental research in the field of contemporary electronic arts has focused on the creative use of telecommunications technologies. He has extensively explored the idea of telematic art, using technology as a tool to eliminate distances. Through his unique use of video conferencing techniques in artistic telepresence applications, he has developed a celebrated series of telematic art installations that have received international acclaim and constantly serve as a reference for his fellow artists in the field.
In Seminal Telematic Dreaming (1992), the visitor can lie down on a bed to discover next to him the body, projected on the sheets, of a woman who looks at us. Although separated by an indefinite distance, bed partners can talk, play with their bodies and share the moment, despite not being able to touch each other. Generating these moments of immaterial intimacy is one of the most fascinating qualities of the work. In All the World's a Screen, a model of a house in Barcelona and a chroma key studio in Great Britain will be the elements with which visitors to both spaces create, in collaboration, films with unpredictable results.
He received the Prix Ars Electronica «Golden Nica», in the interactive art category, for the hypermedia installation Think about the People now, in Linz, Austria, 1991. He produced the ISDN videoconferencing installation Telematic Vision as artist in residence at the ZKM Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie (Center for Media Art and Technology), Karlsruhe, 1993. Received the Sparkey Award at the Interactive Media Festival in Los Angeles, for the telepresent video installation Telematic Dreaming, 1994. From 1993 to 1999 he worked as a professor of electronic art at the HGB Academy of Visual Arts in Leipzig, Germany. During this time he continued to produce interactive telematics installations such as Telamatic Encounter in 1996 and The Tables Turned in 1997 for the Ars Electronica Center in Linz (Austria) and the ZKM Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie in Karlsruhe. From 1997 to 2001 he worked as a visiting professor of performance and environment at the Universität für Künstlerische und Industrialle Gestaltung (University of Art and Industrial Design) in Linz. Since June 2000 he has worked at the University of Salford (Manchester), mainly in the research field of immersive and expanded telematics environments.

For the exhibition banquete_metabolismo he presented The tables turned, three parts, a telematic experience that connected by videoconference three tables installed at medialabmadrid -Centro Cultural Conde Duque-, at the ZKM in Karlsruhe (Germany) and at the Palau de la Virreina in Barcelona.