[ISEA2018] Workshop: Beryl Graham, Sarah Cook & Alexandra Ross — Curating in the In Between

Workshop Statement

Following on from the Daring Curating workshop held at Fak’Ugesi African Digital Innovation Festival in September 2017, in which the hacked-together term “curatoriality” was used to describe the way in which the practice of curating is applied in various degrees according to context and local conditions, this two-day workshop will bring together curators and producers/artists working in-between art and technology. In keeping with the ISEA theme ‘In-between the Cracks’, it will share examples of places and times where curatorial practice (or the curatoriality applied) was as much a result of serendipity, chaos or risk-taking as of careful planning. Contexts and local conditions (Durban to Dundee and everywhere in between) in which hustling and getting things done takes priority over theoretical frameworks will be celebrated. Framed around how ‘the hack’, like curatoriality, involves both informed prior experience and a blind new attempt or best guess at how it will work, the workshop will pull itself up by its bootstraps, insert itself into the interstitial, and evolve as local and international participants get to know and learn from one another.      crumbweb.org

  • Beryl Graham is Professor of New Media Art at the University of Sunderland (UK), and is co-founder of CRUMB resource for curators of new media art. She curated the international exhibition Serious Games for the Laing and Barbican art galleries in 1996. Her books include Digital Media Art (Heinemann 2003), Rethinking Curating: Art After New Media (MIT Press 2010 with Sarah Cook), and New Collecting: Exhibiting and Audiences (Ashgate 2014 ed.). She has been an invited speaker at conferences including Navigating Intelligence (Banff Centre for the Arts), Decoding the Digital (Victoria and Albert Museum), and Cultural Value and the Digital (Tate Modern).
  • Sarah Cook is a curator, writer and Reader at Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art & Design (UK). She works as an associate curator with Scotland’s only digital arts festival NEoN (North East of North). She is editor of the book INFORMATION (Documents of Contemporary Art, Whitechapel and MIT Press, 2016). She lectures and publishes widely about emerging art forms and curatorial practice, teaching on courses concerning media art histories, museum studies and exhibition-making, new media art practice and contemporary art theory. Her research interests include curatorial studies and connections between contemporary media art practices and histories of art and technology.
  • Alexandra Ross is Lecturer in Contemporary Art and Curating at the University of Glasgow, UK, also co-convener of the M.Litt in Curatorial Practice (Contemporary Art) at The Glasgow School of Art. She has taught and supervised at undergraduate and postgraduate level at universities throughout the UK and has recently been accepted on the advisory faculty of the Transart Institute, New York. From 2015 to 2017 she was Postdoctoral Research Fellow with Centre for Curating the Archive, the University of Cape Town. Her more recent research works with the sonic space and the voice, with a curatorial focus on AR, VR, and virtual networks.

Supported by the University of Dundee, University of Glasgow, University of Sunderland, CRUMB