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"Once you’ve curated new media art you’re unlikely to curate anything else the same way again."

Building on research into curating new media art since 1993 at the University of Sunderland, CRUMB was founded by Beryl Graham and Sarah Cook in 2000 within the School of Arts, Design, Media and Culture, with a Small Grant from the Arts and Humanities Research Board. CRUMB's activities cover a range of practices, but are predominantly based around research, networking, and professional development for curators of new media art.

CRUMB members run a lively discussion list on curating new media art with over 1000 international subscribers, publish interviews with curators, and lecture and publish widely, contributing to academic books as well as artists' exhibition catalogues. Articles written by CRUMB team members on the subject of curating new media art are to be found in books published by Routledge, Arts Council of England, University of California Press and The Banff Centre Press and in periodicals such as Leonardo, Art Monthly and Mute Magazine. Cook and Graham's book Rethinking Curating: Art After New Media was published by MIT Press in 2010 and is the leading text in the field.

CRUMB researchers also curate exhibitions as well as organising workshops, masterclasses and conferences for the professional development of curators and the discussion of new media art curating. These include organising the first ever meeting of new media curators in the UK as part of BALTIC's pre-opening programme - a seminar on Curating New Media held in May 2001.

Further dedicated research grants from AHRC and others have allowed CRUMB to expand its team over the years. These researchers have included designer and artist Trudy Lane, web-programmer Spencer Roberts, post-doctoral researchers Dr. Verina Gfader (2007-2010), Dr. Axel Lapp (2009), Dr. Nora O'Murchu (2013), Dr. Isabella Streffen (2013), and doctoral researchers who combine academic, practical and professional expertise including Ele Carpenter (completed 2008), Dominic Smith and Adinda van 't Klooster (both completed 2012), Victoria Bradbury, Roddy Hunter, Marialaura Ghidini and Suzy O'Hara (all current). Full bios for all are below.

Since 2001, the CRUMB team have successfully realised projects through research partnerships with: BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art, UK (2004-2006); The Banff Centre - the Walter Phillips Gallery and the Banff New Media Institute, Canada (2004-2007); The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (2002); Caitlin Jones, Archivist and Curator, who was our Arts Council England funded visiting 'Inspiring Internationalist (2008); Eyebeam (New York) and The Institute for Cultural Research, Lancaster University (Dr. Charlie Gere) (both 2007-2010). We continue to work closely with organisations who produce, support and exhibit new media art including AV Festival (Northeast UK), Transitio Festival (Mexico City), AND Festival (Northwest UK), The Pixel Palace (Tyneside Cinema, Newcastle) and others.




AHRC CDT-funded PhD studentship 2014-17. Dani Admiss is a curator and researcher based in London, UK. Her projects focus on the exchange between art, design, technology and cultural production. She is interested in the staging and consumption of these phenomena within critical and social contexts, specifically the dialogue they share with emerging exhibition formats.

Prior to this she was assistant curator of the international touring exhibition Digital Revolution at the Barbican Centre, London, and the co-curator of The Institute Effect at 'Close, Closer' the 2013 Lisbon Architecture Triennale, Portugal. She has been a visiting lecturer on the MA Curating Contemporary Design at Kingston University (run in partnership with the Design Museum) and with Vassar University, USA. Dani studied BA Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths College University (2003-2006) and was awarded an AHRC Partnership Grant for her MA Curating Contemporary Design at Kingston University in partnership with the Design Museum (2011-2012).

Her PhD research is on emerging types of curatorial practice, focusing on the phenomena of world-building and critical infrastructures in New Media Art and Digital Art.




PhD researcher 2011–15. Victoria Bradbury’s research investigates the performativity of code in participatory new media artworks. Her recent art practice activates programming code, making process, and participants to investigate new media through contexts of participatory knowledge exchange.

In 2015, Bradbury participated in Hack the City (Sheffield) and The Yorkshire Hack (Digital Utopias Conference, Hull). She was a Creative Makings artist-in-residence at Gateshead Arts (2014-15), where she ran workshops in creative coding and physical computing.

In 2014, she was co-Lead Artist organising the Thinking Digital Arts // Hack at New Bridge Project (Newcastle). She participated in Hack the Space at the Tate Modern (London). She was invited by the V&A to discuss her work at their Digital Futures event at the White Building (London). Also in 2014, she co-organised the Into Practice Book Sprint at Banner Repeater (London). She was artist-in-residence at Digital Media Labs (Barrow), and her research was published in CITAR: Journal of Science and Technology of the Arts after the xCoAx Conference (Porto, Portugal). In 2013, she spoke at Maker Space, Newcastle, about her experiences working in hacker spaces in China (Xin Che Jian Shanghai/Beijing Makerspace).

Bradbury’s artworks were exhibited in the Dear Angel exhibition (Globe Gallery, Newcastle 2013), and in the Show Me the Money exhibition and publication (Northern Gallery for Contemporary Art, Sunderland 2014).

Her artwork Blue Boar (2011) was installed at the New Britain Museum of American Art. Midway Projections (2010) was included in Beyond/In: Alternating Currents at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery. The Light in the Background is the Sun (2009), a series of single-channel videos, was screened at Artist Television Access in San Francisco and Hallwalls Gallery in Buffalo, NY, and Home Sweet Home (2010) was projected in the End-to-End exhibition at Harvestworks, NYC.

She has been a faculty fellow for the Institute for Digital Intermedia Arts and Assistant Professor of Electronic Art at Ball State University. From 2009-2010 she taught in the University of Florida Art and Technology department.




AHRC Research Grant-funded PhD Researcher 2004–8, her doctorate concerned investigating how socially engaged and net artists use new media to take cultural and political risk. She completed her PhD in 2008 and is currently a lecturer on the MA Curating Course at Goldsmith's College, London. Ele has curated exhibitions and events with organisations including CCA Glasgow and PVA Media Lab. She also was a founding member of the group which programmed the Side Cinema in Newcastle, where she programmed Contemporary Artists Film and Video, and presented films by artist - filmmakers such as Ursula Biemann, Pierre Bismuth, John Smith, Rod Dickinson and Sarah Tripp. Ele was curator of the Northern Gallery for Contemporary Art 1997-2002, and instigated many major exhibitions, including co-curating the exhibition and publication "Nothing" with Graham Gussin. This toured to: the CAC, Vilnius, Lithuania: the Rooseum, Malmo, Sweden and the Mead Gallery at Warwick Arts Centre. She has programmed over 30 exhibitions including work by Rachael Reupke, Susan Hiller, AK Dolven, the Eames Office, Tanya Axford, Cath Campbell and Londonfieldworks.

http://www.elecarpenter.org.uk/




Sarah Cook is the co-founder and co-editor of CRUMB. From 2004-2013 she worked as research fellow at the University of Sunderland. She is currently a fellow at Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design at Dundee University. In 2008 she was the inaugural curatorial fellow at EYEBEAM in New York, supported by CRUMB's current AHRC grant. From 2006 to 2008 she was supported by a Leverhulme Trust Early Career Fellowship. From Mar 2004 to Mar 2006 she was New Media Curator/Researcher in collaboration with BALTIC, the Centre for Contemporary Art (Gateshead, UK). She completed her Doctorate at the University of Sunderland on the theory and practice of curating new media art in partnership with BALTIC in 2004. Funding for her research has been provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, the AHRB, and Arts Council England. She has a Master's Degree from Bard College's Centre for Curatorial Studies in New York (1998). Sarah has curated exhibitions and commissioned new media art worldwide for organisations including the Banff Centre for the Arts (Canada), the Bellevue Art Museum (Seattle), the Walker Art Center (Minneapolis), and the National Gallery of Canada. She has worked with Thomson&Craighead, Lev Manovich, Cornelia Sollfrank, Jonah Brucker-Cohen, Michel de Broin, Heath Bunting, and many others. Her curated and co-curated exhibitions include: Broadcast Yourself co-curated with Kathy Rae Huffman for AV Festival, Hatton Gallery and Cornerhouse and Database Imaginary co-curated with Anthony Kiendl and Steve Dietz, for Walter Phillips Gallery, Banff, and touring (Dunlop Art Gallery, Regina; Toronto; Montreal).

She is the co-author with Beryl Graham of Rethinking Curating: Art After New Media (MIT Press, 2010) and co-editor of the book Curating New Media (BALTIC, 2002) and has written articles for [A-N], Public Art Journal, Cream and Mute, and chapters for books including New Media in the White Cube and Beyond (2008) and Beyond the Box (2003). Sarah has presented papers at The Photographers Gallery (London), Tate Modern (London), de Balie (Amsterdam) The Banff Centre's Curatorial Research Institute and at Universities worldwide.

http://www.sarahcook.info




AHRC-funded Postdoctoral Researcher 2008–11 Verina Gfader is postdoctoral researcher whose interest is in the criticality of emerging practices, and the ethics and economies of art, with a particular focus on non-linearity, concepts of the minor and articulations of democratic, active work. After studies in Visual Arts and Photography, she completed a practice-based Ph.D. in Fine Arts at Central Saint Martins College, London (titled Doubling in a Practice of Animation Doubling in a Practice of Animation).

In her art practice Verina sometimes uses her pseudonym: Sissu Tarka. She works with animation, temporary architectural constructions, drawing and text, and has exhibited at the ICA digital studio, London, where she also organised a series of talks with Mark Nash, Elena Cologni and Melanie Jackson. Verina's curatorial practice includes her collaboration on exhibition projects with the Galerie im Taxispalais, Innsbruck. There she co-curated shows including Arbeit*/work (which toured to the Lewis Glucksman Gallery, Cork, and the Ormeau Baths Gallery, Belfast and included a symposium and publication) with contributors by artists Carey Young, Moira Zoitl, and Adrian Paci, and theoreticians Ljubomir Bratic, Marion von Osten, Saskia Sassen, et al. Verina has been invited to present work at conferences (Engaging the Im-/possible at Central Saint Martins College, London; Theorising Creativity at Watershed Bristol), and her research on animation has been published in 2011. She is now a research fellow at University of Huddersfield.




AHRC Block Grant-funded PhD studentship 2011–14. Marialaura Ghidini is a curator and researcher based in London, UK. She submitted her practice-based doctoral research, "Curating web-based art exhibitions: mapping their integration with offline formats of display", in January 2015. The thesis is in the field of curatorial studies and exhibition history with a focus on curatorial modes and exhibition models online and the hows and whys of their distribution offline.
Marialaura is founder director of or-bits.com, a web-based curatorial platform that has supported the development, production and presentation of artworks and discourses that engage with the web and internet cultures since 2009.
Her approach to curating is hybrid and across-disciplines and draws on her research and work with different formats of presenting contemporary art to reach audiences outside the gallery space and beyond the exhibition. Interested in how web tools have infiltrated the production and distribution of art and culture, she has commissioned and produced work for online exhibition, public sites, mobile phones, radio broadcasts and publications.

http://marialaura-ghidini.hotglue.me/





Beryl Graham is Professor of New Media Art at the School of Arts, Design and Media, University of Sunderland, and co-editor of CRUMB. She is a writer, curator and educator with many years of professional experience as a media arts organiser, and was head of the photography department at Projects UK, Newcastle, for six years. She curated the international exhibition Serious Games for the Laing and Barbican art galleries, and has also worked with The Exploratorium, San Francisco, and San Francisco Camerawork.


Her book Digital Media Art was published by Heinemann in 2003, she coauthored with Sarah Cook the book Rethinking Curating: Art After New Media for MIT Press in 2010, and edited the book New Collecting for Ashgate in 2014. She has chapters in many books including New Media in the White Cube and Beyond (University of California Press), Theorizing digital cultural heritage (MIT Press) and The 'Do-It-Yourself' Artwork (Manchester University Press). Dr. Graham has presented papers at conferences including Navigating Intelligence (Banff), Museums and the Web (Vancouver), and Decoding the Digital (Victoria and Albert Museum). Her Ph.D. concerned audience relationships with interactive art in gallery settings, and she has written widely on the subject for books and periodicals including Leonardo, Convergence, and Art Monthly.

http://www.berylgraham.com




Roddy Hunter (b. Glasgow, 1970) is an artist, curator, educator and writer based in York, England. He is currently Senior Lecturer & Head of Programme, Fine Arts at York St John University. He has worked internationally across Asia, Europe, Middle East and North America since the 1990s. This work appears in Ice Cream: Contemporary Art in Culture (Phaidon, 2007) and Civil Twilight & Other Social Works (Trace Samizdat, 2007). Curatorial practice includes current doctoral research at CRUMB, University of Sunderland, Span2 (London, 2001) and Rootless ’97: The Nomad Domain (Hull, 1997). He taught at Dartington College of Arts from 1998-2007 and was co-Consul General of The Nomad Territories in England between 1996-1998. He holds an MA Contemporary Arts from Nottingham Trent University and earlier studied literature and theatre at the University of Glasgow. Critical writings include a co-authored history of the Art of Action in Great Britain (Heddon and Klein, 2012) and earlier monograph essays on Alastair MacLennan, John Newling and André Stitt. Numerous public lectures, talks and workshops have been given internationally.

At CRUMB, I am working on ‘Curating The Eternal Network After Globalisation’. The Eternal Network, co-created by artists George Brecht and Robert Filliou in 1968, is an unusual instance of creativity in which arguably the network itself is the artwork. Filliou in particular explored how the network-as-artwork-as-network could enable collaboration, exchange and dialogue across space and time. More than solely a means of distribution or medium of production, The Eternal Network became for him a conceptual context for ‘permanent creation’ (Filliou 1996). The research explores the attractiveness of networks as decentralized or distributed environments bypassing institutional curatorial spaces. How far though has the ‘globalism’ of communication sought by Filliou and others been supplanted by ‘globalisation’ in its neoliberal, doctrinal sense? (Chomsky 1999). Can the network as artwork be effective beyond conceptualisation in material terms? How can we rethink curatorial strategies in respect of the network-as-artwork’s media of production, means of distribution and experience of reception? In short, how can we find ways to curate The Eternal Network after globalisation?




AHRC CDT-funded PhD studentship 2014-17. Liam Jefferies is a designer, curator, researcher and educator who works predominantly the North East of England.
Prior to this he has worked as an educator in a range of settings including Leeds College of Art and Northumbria University. He has also worked on projects for the MIMA (Middlesborough Institute of Modern Art), Hayward Gallery and for a range of private clients. Liam attained a BA in printed textiles from Leeds College of Art in 2007 and an MA From Royal College of Art in 2009.

Liam’s PhD research in Design revolves around the emerging creative and curatorial opportunities provided by Augmented Reality. He is exploring whether the innovative use of Augmented Reality within a gallery setting enables a questioning of the fundamental role of audience and space and helps instigate a move towards ‘open systems'.




Completed AHRC Research Grant-funded PhD studentship in 2012. Since completing her PhD, Dr. Adinda van 't Klooster now works as a lecturer and researcher at Manchester Metropolitan University. She is a UK based artist who has worked with a wide range of media such as video and sound installation, animation, sculpture, and computer generated performance. In her work she creates a multi-sensory experience and explores the areas where art & science overlap. In her doctoral research explored the creation of new tactile interfaces using biofeedback.
http://www.axisweb.org/seCVPG.aspx?ARTISTID=8405 http://www.sunderland.ac.uk/newsevents/news/news/index.php?nid=884




Trudy Lane is a freelance international graphic and web designer, who has worked with Distributive Justice, and Artefact amongst many. She has spoken at conferences including Museums and the Web. Based in New Zealand she is the co-founder of the research centre Intercreate with Ian Clothier and runs the SCANZ residency in New Plymouth. Trudy is the designer of the CRUMB logo and look.

http://rhizome.org/profiles/trudylane2/





AHRC-funded Senior Postdoctoral Fellow with CRUMB 2009–10. Axel Lapp is a leading international curator, art critic, and publisher, with a particular interest in systems-based contemporary art. His book project, Systems, explored the work of the Dutch artist Jeanne van Heeswijk, whose artwork often involves public participation. The book documents her art projects involving squatted buildings, bagel carts, and data mapping which makes explicit parallels between data technological networks and social networks.

Dr. Lapp has a PhD in Art History from the University of Manchester, and has also studied at Phillips-Universität in Marburg and the University of Essex in Colchester. From 1998-2000, he was Henry Moore Research Fellow at the University of Leeds, working on monuments and their theory in the 20th century, and taught in Leeds and at the Martin-Luther-Universität in Halle.
He has been coordinator of the Collectors' Program for Art Forum Berlin, and Associate Curator of the International Curators Forum, London. Since 2000, he has been living in Berlin, and has curated the work of Nick Crowe, Sonia Boyce, Shezad Dawood, Tim Head, Daniel Gustav Cramer, and Bertram Hasenauer, amongst many others, and for bodies including Swiss Federal Government Residency in Berlin and Kunstverein & Wessenberg-Galerie in Konstanz, as well as in his own space, Axel Lapp Projects. He is Art Review's contributing editor for Berlin, and has written on a regular basis for Art Monthly and Art in America. He is co-founder and editor of the art publishers The Green Box. Since November 2012 he is director of MEWO Kunsthalle, the Strigel-Museum and the Antoniter-Museum in Memmingen.

http://axellapp.de/




AHRC Cultural Engagement post-doctoral post Feb – May 2013. Nora O Murchu is a curator and designer. Her research at CRUMB explores experimental approaches to curating new media art and examines current economic, political and cultural factors that are shaping networked culture, and the artistic responses to them.

She received her PhD in 2012 from the University of Limerick. Her research examined online practices of open source users and provides an in-depth analysis of this practice for an Interaction Design context. In addition she suggests curation as a research method for Interactions designers, and provides a detailed account of how this methodology can foster creative innovation for end-users to work as designers in the context of their everyday lives.

She has worked as a research associate for the Interaction Design Centre at the University of Limerick, and the Interaction Research Studio at Goldsmiths , where she has consulted on a broad range of topics, including open-ended design methods, health informatics, and web platforms. She was a researcher on the Tidy Street project, an EPSRC project between the Open University and Goldsmiths that examined the shared energy practices of a small community in Brighton, England.

She is the founder and creative director of Tweak, a digital art and electronic
music festival that took place in Ireland from 2008–10. She has produced exhibitions and events (www.openhere.data.ie) for Trinity College Dublin and the Science Gallery and has curated the work of Golan Levin, Casey Reas, field.io, Anthony Antonellis, Daniel Miller, Gregory Chatonsky, Tristan Perich, and Benjamin Gaulon.

http://www.noraomurchu.com/




AHRC Block Grant-funded PhD studentship 2012–15. Suzy O'Hara is an accomplished project manager with over six years experience in the development and delivery of time based, large scale, complex and high profile arts festivals, events and digital arts commissions.

Suzy has worked with many regional and national partners devising, curating and producing new media/digital arts commissions. These include: Pixelware by Andrew Richardson and the Gothic Self Guided Tour App (Durham Book Festival 2011), Wish Planet by Jana Matekjova (Lumiere 2011), Brass: Digital, a new digital programme strand for the Brass: Durham International Festival 2011 that included two digital arts projects; Gala Manoeuvres by Tim Brennan (mobile app to be launched during AV Festival 2012) and the Digital Music Trial, an international light trail of light installations, projections, film works and light boxes exhibited in shop windows across Durham City to support the four key installations for Enlightenment Festival. Suzy has also successfullyproduced The Durham Book Festival 2009 & 2010, the oldest and largest book festival in the North East.

Suzy is currently working as a freelance arts consultant and arts project manager. She is also working with digital artist, poet and creative writer Stevie Ronnie on Brass Book, a new digital commission that explores the concept of the book in the digital age.




Spencer Roberts worked with CRUMB as half-time Web Programmer and is responsible for having migrated the CRUMB web site into database-driven and expanded form. Spencer has worked on database-driven sites for the Lumen media festival, Brass Art, and Database Imaginary. He teaches in the Department of Creative Technologies at the University of Huddersfield, and has worked and collaborated with other artists on projects including The Trespass of Her Gesture (Anneke Pettican and Spencer Roberts, 2002). In this piece, projected texts appear in response to audience movements. Their latest work in progress is Newsdrip.

http://www.anthropo.org.uk/




Completed AHRC Research Grant-funded PhD studentship in 2012. Since completing his PhD, Dr. Dominic Smith now works as Digital Media Projects Manager for Tyneside Cinema, and was recently invited speaker at the BBC Academy/Arts Council digital partnership 'Building Digital Capacity for the Arts'. He originally studied sculpture and electronic installation, and worked at Tyne and Wear Museums for 5 years in curatorial, outreach, and new media development roles. He is one of the founders of Polytechnic, an artists' group that re-purposes technology and explores open source methods of project development. His doctoral research examined the relationship between open source production methods, and art/curating methods.

http://www.dominicsmith.info/




AHRC Cultural Engagement post-doctoral post Feb – May 2013. Isabella Streffen is an artist who completed her PhD ‘I Spy With My Military Eye: strategies of military vision and their use in fine art practice’ at Newcastle University, before joining CRUMB and then the department of English and American Studies at the University of Manchester to co-curate the exhibition Show Me The Money: Visualising Finance 1700–present (2014–16). She also joined the Fine Art team at Oxford Brookes in the summer of 2013 as an Early Career Research Fellow. Isabella works across media to examine and respond to fundamental problems of politics, perception, technology and narrative. Since 2009 she has been artist-in-residence at the UNESCO World Heritage Site at Hadrian’s Wall, the Terra Foundation for American Art, and the Library of Congress, where she explored the interfaces between cultural and political institutions.

http://isabellastreffen.com/


Keywords:

  installation
  media art
  fine art
  animation
  design
  drawing
  database
  discussion list
  time
  space
  interaction
  interface
  open source
  distribution
  audience
  video
  participation
  collaboration
  press
  festivals
  touring
  radio
  networks
  race

People:

  Sarah Cook
  Kathy Rae Huffman
  Beryl Graham
  Ele Carpenter
  Spencer Roberts
  Trudy Lane
  Steve Dietz
  Cornelia Sollfrank
  Lev Manovich
  Anthony Kiendl
  CRUMB
  Verina Gfader
  Dominic Smith
  Adinda van 't Klooster
  Caitlin Jones
  Axel Lapp
  Mark Nash
  Victoria Bradbury
  Suzy O'Hara
  Marialaura Ghidini
  Roddy Hunter
  Nora O Murchu
  Isabella Streffen
  Liam Jefferies
  Dani Admiss