Kristoffer Ørum
Works with machines that are confidently wrong.
Comedy.
A teacher who keeps a studio in order to have something to teach from.
An artist who makes things up about real places.
Nothing digital about it. A screen is an object, and objects sit in rooms.
A record-keeper. The website is the work.
In Aalborg, at Nordkraft the project was hosted in a former power plant turned cultural venue. Mundane Heroics, 2019
Day to Day Data highlights the poetic, speculative, and sometimes humorous dimensions of personal and domestic data. Day to Day Data, 2008
Aarhus'er #1 is the most expansive chapter in Kristoffer Ørum's ongoing counterfactual project "Frihed, lighed og hip-hop" (Freedom, Equality and Hip-Hop), created in collaboration with rapper Emilio Hestepis. Aarhus'er #1, 2025
Additional elements included a video installation where visitors had Putin's face projected over them, making them momentarily become Putin speaking about Russian male superiority and Western decadence. Putin's Nose, 2019
Standing at 1.5 metres, the piece draws on 17th-century drawings by Jón Skonvig, known for his work with antiquarian Ole Worm. The Good, the Lost, and the Beautiful, 2025
The project questions the assumption that it is "easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of the welfare state" (paraphrasing Slavoj Žižek). Melting State, 2020
However, following decades of “misuse”, the area is presently being integrated back into the rest of the city as a productive and commercially viable new part of town called “art city”. Brownfield Wonderland, 2022
One room was painted bright pink with beetroot juice, smelling earthily of childhood beetroot soup, and featured a Russian rap sung by a life-sized copy of Putin's nose. Putin's Nose, 2019
Or the years when rap lyrics were about helping at home and taking good care of elderly citizens? Frihed, Lighed Og Hip-Hop, 2023
The signal crayfish served as a figure for both biological invasion and technological infiltration. Signal_Crayfish, 2021
It considers what AI might look like if it evolved through neighbourhood initiatives, recycled consumer hardware, and community-specific datasets, moving at the pace of shared maintenance rather than commercial urgency. Diffused States (Lexington), 2025
The work examined how digital recognition systems and facial detection algorithms influence perception and identity. Putins Nose, 2018
The headline read "The Inscrutable Face of Russia." This sparked reflections on how much difference there actually is between the paranoid gaze of computer surveillance technologies and that of human beings. Putin's Nose, 2019
I believe a stronger foundation for community lies in a shared recognition of vulnerability. None of These Images Are of Me, 2025
The work asks how we can imagine a future after the welfare state, now that it seems to be definitively being dismantled. Melting State, 2020
Each figure is both a memory and a proposition—an echo of what might have been, and a sketch of what still could be. Monuments of a Fictional Past (Kraków Edition), 2025
I also do it because local AI is itself an impure position. None of These Images Are of Me, 2025
Data Kroppe is a video artwork by Kristoffer Ørum, commissioned and broadcast by Danish national television (DR) and featured on DR Kulturklubben. Data Kroppe, 2017
The installation featured speculative scenarios about living arrangements including large oyster habitations. Ebeltoft After The Flood, 2021
SignalCrayfish was presented as part of the two-person exhibition "Semio-Technical Traffics" with Emily Rosamond. Signal_Crayfish, 2020
Lesson plans, assessment structures and financial data are translated into dynamic graphics, situating the institution in relation to broader societal forces and its individual members. A Body Has Many Members, 2012
But there is now a third gaze, one that works through calculation. Speaker 1, 2026
The symposium featured artists and scholars examining contemporary forms of image making and computational apparatus, investigating relations between desire and automation, uncertainty and labour, self and other. It Sings for Us of What We Might Become, 2019
The project formed part of a research collaboration between the participating museums and the University of Copenhagen. Signal_Crayfish, 2020
The images are unstable and shifting, conjuring a welfare system built on an uneasy combination of nature and technology that is neither utopian nor dystopian but simply strange and somehow plausible. Leddyrsomsorg / Arthropod Care, 2026
My focus, however, lands on the moments of breakdown and confusion where this logic fails. Speaker 1, 2026
Depth Estimation is a 3D printed sculpture made from corn starch with inkjet transfer, based on algorithmic depth estimation of a photograph. Depth Estimation, 2019
Even the City Dreams of Being Another is part of the exhibition At the Edge II, presented at Skene in Malmö. Even the City Dreams of Being Another, 2025
It is an experiment in seeing, questioning not just what we see in the news, but how we are conditioned to see it. Watershed, 2025
Rather than recognising faces, it was trained exclusively to see noses or beetroot-like patterns. Putin's Nose, 2019
The two videos alternate: when one plays, the other rests. Leddyrsomsorg / Arthropod Care, 2026
The work involved 3D-printing signal crayfish models equipped with electromagnetic sensing components. Signal_Crayfish, 2021
The project reflected on the transformation of the district: once a mixed working-class and industrial area, now rapidly becoming an upscale residential neighbourhood. City Planning, 2010
The exhibition blurs the line between documentary and fiction, making room for the unrealised potential of the past to resurface not as nostalgia, but as unfinished possibility. Aarhus'er #1, 2025
Especially simulations of destruction are so widespread and credible that one quickly forgets what the original physical phenomena looked like. Melting State, 2020
The exhibition was accompanied by the website Mundanemonsters.oerum.org and a series of interventions in the local urban space. Mundane Monsters, 2023
Like collage, the work is not about arriving at a definitive meaning but about generating provisional configurations that open new ways of seeing. Watershed, 2025
The work was exhibited alongside Emily Rosamond's work on historical communication systems, from ancient oracles to wartime frequency-hopping technologies. Signal_Crayfish, 2020
When compositional and editorial hierarchies are systematically dismantled, how does the perceived importance of visual information change? Watershed, 2025
The video Computer-generated video and sound, 20 min, made with WAN 2.1 on a local RTX 4090, projected on the end wall of a darkened gallery. Leddyrsomsorg / Arthropod Care, 2026