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Beryl Graham and Sarah Cook. Rethinking Curating: Art After New Media. Cambridge, MA, London, England: The MIT Press, 2010.

by Katerina Gkoutziouli

“Rethinking Curating. Art After New Media” by Beryl Graham and Sarah Cook has been a much-awaited book for those working in the field of new media and curating. In 2000, the authors launched CRUMB [Curatorial Resource for Upstart Media Bliss], an ongoing online resource and mailing list for curating new media art, which operates as a place for research, networking and discussions on the subject. This book is a consequence of all those years of research and work in the field by the authors, coupled with the input from the CRUMB community.

Acknowledging the fact that new media art is a contested term on its own, the authors make clear from the very beginning that they seek to define new media art as a ‘set of behaviours’. Thus, they prefer to call it “Art after New Media”. Besides, their primary focus is on the behaviours/characteristics of the artworks and then later on the various media used for production, distribution and presentation. By doing so, they address the possibilities of discussing new media art in the broadest context of contemporary art as seen through previous moments in art history and through a strong illustration and analysis of projects, exhibitions and practitioners’ views on the subject. As Steve Dietz puts it in the introduction “it's not a book about new media, it is a book about art; it’s not a book about curating new media, it's about rethinking curating” [p. xiv].

The first part of the book is concerned with putting new media art in context by illuminating its characteristics and by reviewing the convergence points between older and newer art forms and methods. To understand what new media art is and how it behaves, one first needs to relate it to a broad set of theories and histories that not only respond to an art context but also to technological histories and other cultural forms. This book is not about the debate between Turing Land vs Duchamp Land as Lev Manovich has put it, but it is about finding and looking at the correlations between these two lands.

The concept of ‘The Art Formerly Known as “New Media”’, challenges the very notion of the new, almost provocatively questioning curators who are seduced by the novelty and not by the context that the artwork seeks to generate. Can new media art be interpreted by its behaviors and be explored through computability, connectivity and interactivity?

Having these characteristics in mind, the authors seek to unfold the particularities of two main issues for art, namely space and time. They discuss the analogy between the dematerialization of the artwork in the 60s and 70s (something that was then framed under the terms “conceptual art” and “systems based art”) and the immateriality of today’s art within networks and virtual spaces. The art space itself has extended and so has curatorial practice. Which brings us to the question of what the role of the curator is in a distributed networking condition? And how have the variable manifestations of space redefined curatorial decisions? The authors set out to explore not only how significant the space is for art but also how art can be transmitted and communicated in different contexts. “When the work is immaterial – framed and understood only through participation in the system itself- then the network of its distribution is highlighted”. [p.60]

On the other hand, space and material, of course, do exist in new media but we can trace the differences, for example, between real-time projects, the immateriality of code and algorithm on a computer screen and virtual reality projects. It becomes apparent then that the challenge for curators remains in bridging the gap between virtual and physical spaces.

In new media art, it is difficult to differentiate between time and space, as both seem to converge in the behaviours of the media such as liveness, connectivity and computability. The distinction between “real-time”, “time-based” and “live” is useful in order to comprehend the concept of time. For example, the concept of real-time is different in video art from other forms of new media art. As the writers put it: “Real-time for video means instant feedback…while… real-time for computers concerns instantaneity of processing and manipulation of data” [p.97]. Curators need to constantly reinvent methods in order to respond to the needs of an artwork and correspond to the ways that the institution, the audience and the exhibition itself interpret time.

The authors move on to an investigation of participative systems taking into consideration the interactive, participative and collaborative behaviours of new media art and they ask the question “Who is involved in the systems, and how?” [p.111] An analysis of new media art projects, such as Rafael Lozano Hemmer’s “Body Movies, Relational Architecture No.6” (2001) and Harrell Fletcher’s and Miranda July’s “Learning to love you More” (2002-) leads the discussion to the varying dynamics triggered by the use of different media. Participation is a tricky behaviour, as it might be prompted by the art, the media used, the institution, the gallery, the curator and most importantly by the audience. However, there are still various factors at play that keep redefining the levels of participation, a fact that turns curatorial activity itself into a hybrid practice.

The second part of the book looks into the practice of curating in terms of contexts, practices and processes. Starting with an account of the different working realities of a curator, such as working in a museum, working on both a freelance basis, and as part of an institution, the authors consider the varying ‘responsibilities’ of a curator. The work of a curator usually aims at creating a structure or a process. However, especially when it comes to new media, curating can be identified as having several experimental modes and exhibition models, which the authors seek to unravel in the following chapters.

The analysis that they put forward highlights not only the theoretical aspects of curating but also challenges the ways that curators and institutions work. They look at how new media art is perceived in terms of interpretation by the institution and the audience when it comes to the method of display. Providing an extensive list of examples, ranging from online platforms such as Tate Media and exhibitions such as 010101 at SFMOMA (2001), the authors discuss the challenges of new media when it is archived and presented online as interpretation material and when it is accompanied by interpretive material in physical spaces. The ways that new media art enters the museum are examined, as it is often through educational departments. Questions regarding audience reception and interpretation of new media art are also explored relating to themes of curatorial practice, such as how you build an audience for such practices and who your audience is when it comes to curating in online spaces.

Looking at theoretical issues (such as how a curator’s decision might be influenced by the art museum) as well as at practical issues (such as the technology required for a new media exhibition along with marketing, sponsorship, archiving and collecting) the authors explore the ways that new media art behaves in such contexts. The call for curators to acquire a crossover approach on the subject in order to incorporate this type of work in a museum framework is increasingly becoming urgent.

For this reason, other modes of curating are explored in the book, such as the festival, publishing, the public space and the lab among others. With well-documented case studies such as New Media Scotland, the V2_ Lab, Rotterdam, and independent art projects like Kate Rich’s “Feral Trade”, the authors attempt to investigate the experiments and the boundaries between art, research and technology. These strategies lead to questions such as how different audiences perceive art and how the curator operates within hybrid art contexts.

Furthermore, collaboration cannot be absent when we talk about new media art and it is a subject discussed in relation to other ways of curating, outside of the institutional context. In this light, artist-run organizations and alternative spaces that focus on working methods of learning and sharing serve as examples to highlight the collective processes undertaken between artists, curators and audience. Exploring the interplay between roles that range from ‘the artist as curator’, ‘the audience as curator’ to ‘no curator at all’, the authors seek to address the particularities of new media art, including interconnectedness and networking, that allow for these experimental structures.

Given the fact that new media art tends to commonly be described or categorized by its medium, this book sheds new light on the various approaches a curator might take, as well as on the methodologies of historicizing and creating contexts for such work to be explored, analyzed and reviewed.

Ultimately, the best reason to read this book is because it puts new media art in context. It serves as an insightful compilation of projects, exhibitions, and theories on new media that might have otherwise gone uncontextualized. “Rethinking Curating” does not aim to serve as a media-specific book since new media art is an unstable field in constant evolution, but as a curatorial handbook that provides a comprehensive analysis of curatorial practice while creating a semantic bridge between older and newer art forms.

- Issue 16 of web-journal On-Curating is out: Precarious Labour in the Field of Art.

- Hyperallergic has brought to light a study that finds American non-profits „suck at fundraising.“
- Another report mentioned in the post's comments: 3 Factors Impacting Nonprofit Fundraising Confidence.

- An amusing article from the Independent: Why it's time for galleries to dump the jargon.

- Artsy interviewed Rhizome Program Director Zoë Salditch for their 'Five Questions For' series.

- Amid the economic crisis, the Brazilian Government has announced its workers will receive a 50-real (€19; £16; $US25) monthly stipend for “cultural expenses,” The Art Daily reports.
- On a related note, the Vancouver Observer defends a local music venue, and speaks to the return value of government investment in arts and culture: M-O-N-E-Y: Why government investment in culture pays off.
- Similarly, Michigan Is Finding That the Arts Is a Growth Industry, Even During the Recession: “every $1 invested in the arts in the Great Lakes State yields $51 for the state’s economy.”

- Finally, we're saying goodbye to Agnes Gryczkowska, Charu Maithani and Sophia Zhou, who have been pivotal in bringing curating.info's services to you over the past six months. We're thrilled to bring in three new members of the editorial team: Luminița Apostu, Leela Clarke and Sofia Landström.

- This week we made the very exciting announcement of our Musée Imaginaire concours in collaboration with KAPSUL.

- 'What's (Really) Specific about New Media Art? Curating in the Information Age'
Domenico Quaranta asks: “does new media art require a specific curatorial model?... Are we curating “new media” or curating “art”?”

- Roberta Smith on art fairs, strained galleries, and the “top-heavy spaceship” of high-art-commodity: ‘Art Fairs, Full of Bling if Not Fire’

- The Guardian’s Yasmin Khan: ‘Museums in the information age: survival of the most digital?’

- Gallerist NY: “Multiple-curator biennials are really having a moment! This year’s just-closed Gwangju Biennale had six artistic directors. Next year’s Whitney Biennial will have three. The upcoming Carnegie has three. And now the 2013 Texas Biennial will apparently have no fewer than 13”

- A highly entertaining research paper by Alix Rule and David Levine for Triple Canopy: 'International Art English'

- Some Bests of 2012:
Best exhibitions:
Holland Cotter in New York,
Christopher Knight in LA ,
the Guardian’s writers in Britain and beyond,
also Chicago, Glasgow, Philadelphia,
and the best worldwide from ArtForum Slant and GalleristNY.

Also,
the Biggest Art Controversies,
5 Art Trends from Hyperallergic,
the 10 highest auction prices,
Frieze's 'cheerful' picks of 2012's best exhibitions, people and institutions,
and Art and Auction’s Power 100 list, with Art Fag City’s supplement: Auction Power Hair.

- We’re still taking applications for the curating.info internship! Apply before Jan 7, 2013.

Despite the fact that new media art might be still treated as a new and recent phenomenon of art practice, the story of new media can be traced back as early as the sixties. Artists such as John Cage, Allan Kaprow, Roy Ascott, E.A.T. have been preoccupied with themes including interaction, multimedia, electronics, kineticism, cybernetics and technology, and so have curators and theorists such as Marshall McLuhan, Jasia Reichardt, Lucy Lippard and Jack Burnham, among others. The context for artists, theorists and curators alike has been changing since that time, when this type of work formed a new territory for exploration in the arts. There was not only a change in creative language, but also a change in aesthetics and attitudes that would effect the ways we perceive artworks, exhibitions and cultural production in general.

One of the landmark exhibitions was €œLes Immateriaux€ curated by Jean-Francois Lyotard at the Centre Pompidou, Paris in 1985. Lyotard had already written his seminal book The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (1979) in which he examined the changes in human condition effected by technological developments in communications, mass media and computer science. The exhibition sought to present the repercussions of such a restructure of society and culture and also to construct an emergent space filled with emergent concepts. Nathalie Heinich explains €œPaintings and sculptures were still present, of course, but became part of a much larger set of information made up of signs, words, sounds and technical artefacts€ in a labyrinth-like exhibition space. Additionally, the notion of “immateriality” was introduced at a point when computers and interfaces were not user-friendly, a fact that also highlighted the latent problematic aspects of technology in art making and curating.∗ Curating here may have functioned as a philosophical quest authored by Lyotard, which in spite of its drawbacks has opened the door to a new era of exhibition making.

Moving forward to the mid-nineties, we can see the next wave of artists and curators engaging with new media under a new set of conditions again. Since the term “new media” is a very loose one, I would like at this point to refer to Olia Lialina’s description of new media: “a field of study that has developed around cultural practices with the computer playing a central role as the medium for production, storage and distribution”. However, it still seems that new media art cannot be contextualized under a certain canon because of its hybrid forms, and there is still a need for new media art practitioners - be they artists, curators, theorists- to provide a contextual umbrella for new media practices to be discussed.

From a curatorial perspective, new media art has brought new challenges to contemporary curating with its immaterial nature, its interactive qualities, its computer-based character and its constant developments. Anyone working with or keeping track of the shifts in new media will have noticed that new media art can be “web-based projects, sound events, virtual reality installations, mobile cellular, or PDA projects, and practices- conceptual art practices, networked-based practices, software coding or sampling” as Sarah Cook has outlined.∗∗ It is hard to permit the flexible and dynamic character of new media art to fully articulate in an exhibition space since most new media artworks tend to defy physicality. The need for new curatorial expressions to embrace the concepts of new media is becoming more and more apparent in the variety of exhibition formats.

Curating in online contexts has been a prevalent mode for web-based art projects. A rewind through the recent history of new media art will remind us that the dawn of the World Wide Web proved beneficial to web artists not only because of the new possibilities of the medium, but also because it allowed a certain degree of autonomy from institutions and curators altogether. An early example of such an exhibition was the project Desktop Is (1997) initiated by artist Alexei Shulgin for which he gathered desktop screenshots from 67 artists and hosted them online for public viewing. The developments the World Wide Web brought about at that time were equally important for curators. The novel notion of distribution and communication meant that not only artworks could be distributed but also curatorial practice. The “instantaneity in contemporary culture” (Charlie Gere, 2008)∗∗∗ was and still is evident and emergent in many distributed artworks and exhibitions on the web. For example, the exhibition Beyond Interface (1998) curated by Steve Dietz at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis. On the archival website of the exhibition, one can find Steve Dietz'€™s quote, which reads: “This online exhibition presents a simple proposition. There is art that is created to "be" on the Net. After that, it gets more complex very quickly. Beyond Interface explores some of the complicating issues but does not attempt a comprehensive investigation… the main goals of Beyond Interface are to present outstanding examples of net-based artistic activity, and to try and begin to better understand and appreciate this art and its context.” Steve Dietz is very conscious about his early venture by pointing out the uncertainties of curating web-specific exhibitions. Nevertheless, that is mostly the case when something new is coming out. By laying emphasis on the art and its context, Dietz attempts to highlight the dynamic of web-based artworks, being fluid and hybrid and also the Web as a space for art production, curating and cultural interaction. However, while distributed curatorial practice on the web might fulfill the democratic and decentralised expectations of its medium, it also could ensure the work is easily confined to a specialist audience online.

Curating new media art in “offline” contexts is another main method of presenting such work. From the eighties onwards, many different spaces and structures have flourished to support new media art activities. New media centres such as ZKM in Germany, The Banff Centre in Canada and FACT in England; festivals, like Ars Electronica and Transmediale; galleries such as the Furtherfield Gallery in London; and labs such as the V2_ Institute for the Unstable Media in the Netherlands, among others. Contemporary art museums have been quite wary of new media art, with some exceptions such as SFMOMA, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and Baltic. Simply stated, the visibility of new media art exhibitions in museums is low compared to mainstream contemporary art shows. The exhibition Database Imaginary (The Banff Center, Alberta, Canada, 2004) curated by Sarah Cook, Steve Dietz and Anthony Kiendl included works from 1971 to 2004. The exhibition sought to explore the idea of the database as an evolving phenomenon in human culture, featuring works such as Hans Haacke’s “Visitors’ Profile” (1971), a questionnaire about contemporary events that was distributed to museum visitors to a group exhibition in Milwaukee and Graham/Mongrel’s “Lungs-London.pl” (2004), a Perl software-code poem based on the 1792 poem London by William Blake. Database Imaginary attempts to establish connections between old and new art forms that share a common ground. Such exhibitions provide a space, firstly, to reflect on the continuum of ideas taking “shape” through a range of mediums and secondly, to discover the correlations that new media art shares with its precursors. The idea of creating narratives that are not fragmentary and follow the trail of art development also shows the dynamic of curatorial practice itself. If museums refrain from showing new media art by being skeptical about the qualities of such art in the course of art history, then exhibitions, such as Database Imaginary, provide for the art references that institutions may lack.

There is no doubt that there is not a singular practice or canon of curating new media art and that is primarily triggered by the hybridism of the art itself. Christiane Paul (2008) has argued that ‘Because new media art is more process-oriented than object-oriented, it is important to convey the underlying concept of this process to the audience’.∗∗∗∗ New media art curators need to be constantly resourceful in order to create evocative spaces and experiences. As new media art gradually enters the museum doors, curatorial strategies need not only communicate the art but also the fact that the exhibition itself is a process.





∗ See Nathalie Heinich (2009) “Les Immatériaux Revisited: Innovation in Innovations” and Sarah Cook (2008) “Immateriality and its discontents. An overview of main models and Issues for Curating New Media” in Christiane Paul (ed.), New Media in the White Cube and Beyond. Curatorial Models for Digital Art. University of California Press, pp 26 - 49

∗∗ Sarah Cook (2008), “Immateriality and Its Discontents. An Overview of Main Models and Issues for Curating New Media”, in Christiane Paul (ed.), New Media in the White Cube and Beyond. Curatorial Models for Digital Art. University of California Press, p. 27

∗∗∗ Charlie Gere (2008). “New media Art and the Gallery in the Digital Age” in Christiane Paul (ed.), New Media in the White Cube and Beyond. Curatorial Models for Digital Art. University of California Press, p. 23

∗∗∗∗ Christiane Paul (2008), “Challenges for a Ubiquitous Museum. From the White Cube to the Black Box and Beyond”, in Christiane Paul (ed.), New Media in the White Cube and Beyond. Curatorial Models for Digital Art. University of California Press, p. 65

A rare opportunity for a funded PhD studentship with CRUMB. Previous applicants are very welcome to apply. Full details, see:
http://nuweb.northumbria.ac.uk/nebgp/curating.html

AHRC Postgraduate Studentship Opportunities

Northumbria and Sunderland Universities operate a collaborative AHRC
Block Grant Partnership to support quality research and professional
training in the Arts & Humanities. Studentships are available for
uptake from September/October 2011 including:

Doctoral Studentship, D4 Fine Art(Curating New Media Art)

Applications

Applications are invited electronically on the relevant form by no
later than 12.00 noon on Monday 18 April 2011. Applications received
after this date and time will be kept on file as reserves.

Awards cover stipend and fees subject to eligibility criteria including
UK residency, see the AHRC Guide to Student Funding
http://www.ahrc.ac.uk/FundingOpportunities/Documents/
GuidetoStudentFunding.pdf

Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) is the UK funding body for
the arts and humanities. Each year the AHRC provides funding from the
Government to support research and postgraduate study in the arts and
humanities. Only applications of the highest quality and excellence are
funded. Research supported by this investment provides social and
cultural benefits and also contributes to the economic success of the
UK. For further information on the AHRC, please see
http://www.ahrc.ac.uk.

The AHRC Block Grant Partnership scheme provides funding at Master's
and doctoral level to Research Organisations that have shown strong
evidence of excellent strategic planning for, and delivery of, high
quality postgraduate research and training in the arts and humanities.
It enables long-term planning for the support of high quality
postgraduate research and training by allocating awards to five annual
cohorts of postgraduate students. Please see
http://www.ahrc.ac.uk/News/Latest/Pages/pgpostsconfirmed.aspx

- Paul Lang is the newly-appointed curator at the National Gallery of Canada. At the job interview, he was asked by National Gallery Director Marc Mayer: "Were I to hire you for this job, who do you work for?" Lang replied: "I work for the public and so do you."

- "...it [curating] seemed to suit my personality better than being an academic, because you're always starting new projects. A curator is different in the sense that one of your main responsibilities is communication -- how you translate what you see in the artwork, what you feel is important about it, to an audience." - Shamim Momin

- "One of the most powerful functions that I have as a curator at a major art organization such as Creative Time is the power to legitimate phenomena. [...] The sad fact is that while critics still worry about whether things are art or not, the big game of cultural production has left the art arena and is now at the disposal of the capitalist machine of cultural production. If art is to challenge the present condition, it must make the scope of its questions and audience much broader and more exacting. For those that take this task seriously, I want to legitimate their efforts." - Nato Thompson

- Witte de With recently held Act X of the Rotterdam Dialogues: Morality. The Witte de With has posted audio files of the talks, including talks by curators Tirdad Zolghadr, Adriano Pedrosa, Clémentine Deliss, Dessislava Dimova, Candice Hopkins, and others.

- Two new book reviews up, and more to come! Check out my reviews of A Brief History of Curating by Hans Ulrich Obrist and New Media in the White Cube and Beyond, edited by Christiane Paul.

New Media in the White Cube and Beyond: Curatorial Models for Digital Art is a collection of essays edited by Christiane Paul (curator at the Whitney Museum of American Art), addressing several topics of concern to new media art curators. The twelve essays cover the full range of territory that curators will encounter, from understanding how artists use the medium to considering how to preserve works far into the future.

Paul's introduction to the book is a solid briefing for curators interested in new media art but who haven't ventured far into this area yet, and it also usefully summarises the many issues in the field for veteran new media curators. Though each essay is generous with concrete examples, a case studies section is also included. The case studies provide intense and practical examinations of detail which also serve to bolster the points made in the essays.

The book focuses on addressing the proverbial elephant in the room when it comes to new media and museums, which could be glibly summed up as "why don't museums get it?". As the introduction explains and several essays reiterate, museums are in the business of presentation, interpretation, and conservation, and the very nature of new media art makes those three actions difficult. In Jon Ippolito's essay "Death by Wall Label", he says "Like a shark, a new media artwork must keep moving to survive". Museums in their current configuration are clearly a little more at ease with a stationary shark (in the natural history wing, stuffed; or in the contemporary art wing, preserved nicely in formaldehyde, perhaps?) rather than the restless shark-like character of new media. There is no "set it and forget it" if you are in the business of presenting this kind of work.

So what can be done? Several of the contributors offer concrete ways of addressing the gap. Sarah Cook proposes some metaphors for curatorial thinking around these exhibitions: exhibition as software programme/data flow; exhibition as trade show; and exhibition as broadcast. Metaphor and analogy is a tool used throughout, by multiple contributors: Sara Diamond also uses the metaphor of flows in her essay; Caitlin Jones and Carol Stringari use the analogy of removing old, darkened varnish from a nineteenth-century painting when considering the challenges in conserving media works. The heavy use of metaphor and analogy, and making direct links to traditional conservation as Jones and Stringari do with their painting example, will surely make the issues seem less alien to those who are relative newcomers to the presentation and conservation of new media.

Overall this book is an excellent reference and insight into new media from leading thinkers such as Sarah Cook, Jon Ippolito, Charlie Gere, Sara Diamond, and Christiane Paul herself.

More info and to order: New Media in the White Cube and Beyond: Curatorial Models for Digital Art

Thanks to everyone who was able to assist the Netherlands Media Art Institute by responding to their survey targeted at curators, which I posted here. The NIMk received 172 responses, and have collated the results into a report that you can download in PDF format at the Culture Vortex website.
I encourage you to browse the whole report, but thought I'd point out findings that I think are interesting:
- only 20% of the respondents use online video sites (Vimeo, YouTube) to scout for new work.
- 67% of respondents listed UbuWeb as one of their most visited websites, however, suggesting that curators appreciate a resource that is already heavily curated.
- there is no interest in a printed catalogue of NIMk's works for distribution, but heavy interest in being able to save selections in NIMk's online catalogue.
- several needs were identified, including access to full-length works online, access to non-Western work, and access to performance work.
Get the whole report here.

The Netherlands Media Art Institute has developed an online survey specifically designed for professional curators and programmers of exhibitions, screenings and festivals. The questionnaire was developed by the distribution department of the Netherlands Media Art Institute, in which they seek to learn about ways to improve their services.

The questions are good and got me thinking about how I search for new work and artists. It takes just a few minutes, follow this link: www.thesistools.com/web/?id=149485 to give your point of view to NIMk.

Rhizome is a leading arts organization dedicated to the creation, presentation, preservation, and critique of emerging artistic practices that engage technology. Through open platforms for exchange and collaboration, our website serves to encourage and expand the communities around these practices. Our programs, many of which happen online, include commissions, exhibitions, events, discussion, archives and portfolios. Rhizome is an affiliate of the New Museum of Contemporary Art.

Rhizome seeks a Curatorial Fellow from late April through August 2009. The Fellow will support the curatorial and editorial departments at Rhizome through research, writing and administration. This position is a unique opportunity for a person interested in pursuing a career in contemporary art to further their engagement with the field and hone their professional skills.

The Curatorial Fellow must be based in New York and must be able to commit to 16 hours of work per week, for 6 months, beginning in Spring 2009. This position is unpaid, but academic credit may be arranged. The Curatorial Fellow will work directly with artists and be overseen by the Director and Senior Editor.

The Fellow’s primary responsibilities include:

- Coordination, and development of the Rhizome ArtBase, including managing submissions and reaching out to artists
- Curating sections of the Rhizome website
- Researching topics for editorial coverage
- Writing articles for Rhizome’s blog and publications
- Administrative support of programs, such as Rhizome’s monthly New Silent Series at the New Museum
- General support of the organization

QUALIFICATIONS: Candidates should have a level of familiarity with contemporary art and particularly new media and its history. Education or advanced experience beyond the undergraduate level is preferred. At a minimum, the candidate should have very strong writing, editing, and analytical skills, and very high internet literacy. Knowledge of Microsoft Office software is also required and basic Photoshop skills are preferred.

TO APPLY: Please email a cover letter, resume or c.v., three references, and three writing samples (urls or attachments) to Ceci Moss at editor(at)rhizome.org. Review of applications will begin immediately. Deadline is April 15, 2009.

Since January 2007, the TAGallery project has posed the question: "What if a link becomes representative of the artefact, the context and the exhibition at once?" As of July 2008, there are 500 different answers, represented by 438 artists, 473 artworks, 483 tags, a dozen of curators and still 999 exhibitions to come. Finally it is time to open the folksonomic experiment for public participation. From July 15 to September 15 netizens were invited to contribute link-collections, to re-contextualise the existing material and/or to experiment with tagging as a curatorial practice within the framework of TAGallery. If you are interested in participating please go to the CONT3XT website and read about how to submit an exhibition. Do not hesitate to contact cont3xt-at-cont3xt-dot-net if there are any questions.

TAGallery: http://del.icio.us/TAGallery
About TAGallery: http://cont3xt.net/curating/tagallery
Exhibitions TAGallery: http://tagallery.cont3xt.net

University of Sunderland (School of Arts, Design, Media & Culture) seeks to appoint a post doctoral level researcher to join the collaborative research team CRUMB supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Council. The post will undertake a 12 month project on "Curating new media art: networks and connections". The position will involve contributing to the professional practice and research culture of curating new media art in the local region, nationally and internationally.

You will have a post graduate level qualification or equivalent in a relevant area, a strong record of conducting independent research with a track record of curating new media art with organisations to national and international standing. For an informal discussion about the post please contact Professor Beryl Graham, Principal Investigator, by email: beryl.graham -at- sunderland.ac.uk

Closing Date: 25 January 2008
Fixed term from May 2008 to April 2009
£27,466 - £32,796 per annum
Ref No: ADR020/1469

An application form and Role Profile can be obtained by contacting Human Resources on 0191 515 2057 or www.sunderland.ac.uk/jobs

CRUMB is supported by funding from the Arts and Humanities Research Council. Dr Cook is a Leverhulme Trust Early Career Fellow.