An Interview with curator and CRUMB co-founder Sarah Cook

This interview was conducted in Ottawa, May 2010 by Felicity Tayler and Corina MacDonald for artengine.ca

What can curators of contemporary art learn from the distributed and participatory systems of new media art? Sarah Cook and Beryl Graham, co-founders of CRUMB (The Curatorial Resource for Upstart Media Bliss, www.crumbweb.org), are the authors of the recent volume Rethinking Curating: Art After New Media (MIT Press). While in residence at SAW video in Ottawa, Sarah Cook took a pause from a flurry of activity to expand upon concepts evoked between the covers of the book and during her presentation at the National Gallery of Canada. As Nathaniel Stern observes in his review (http://rhizome.org/editorial/3617) of this collaborative work (authored with drafts exchanged via email and Wiki), the number of examples and citations provide a provocative constellation of possibilities. They argue that the connectivity of new media art challenges default modes of artistic authorship and curatorial operation and points towards new metaphors and modes of curating as a distributed activity. Read more.