"It Sings for Us of What We Might Become" is a specially commissioned performative lecture presented as part of the symposium "ScreenShots: Desire and Automated Image" at Kunsthal Aarhus. The work utilises the props and techniques of an academic presentation in a playful and explorative manner, examining present-day culture of classification and the potential of letting go of control.

The performative lecture addresses how we might recover some semblance of agency and hope while living under the gaze of ever more watchful algorithmic systems of control. Rather than simply discussing these themes, the performance stages a series of unstable software experiments and semi-fictional narratives, creating a situation that is deliberately out of the performer's control.

The work opens itself to failure, loss of control and improvisation, embodying these conditions rather than merely describing them. Ørum attempts to summon a dynamic and fallible digital imaginary to counter the dominating utopian narratives of reliable and all-seeing artificial "intelligences." The performance positions misunderstanding and inaccuracy as alternatives to what appears to be a widespread sense of powerlessness in the face of sales hyperbole and fearmongering.

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. The exhibition "ScreenShots: Desire and Automated Image" investigated image and its apparatus of production, which today is increasingly based on technologies of computation. 3D computer graphics, screen resolution protocols and machine learning algorithms formed part of the contemporary technologies examined in the image making processes.

Artists in the exhibition made use of screenshot properties as a medium and tool, disrupting traditional understanding of computation by injecting their desires and bodies to become part of the process of image making together with data and computation. The screenshot format, originally used to represent human-computer interactions in computer-aided design, was considered as an aesthetic form that facilitates representation of computational processes while always remaining in the making and unfinished.

"It Sings for Us of What We Might Become" was presented as part of Panel 1, chaired by Magdalena Tyżlik-Carver, alongside Geoff Cox's presentation "Seeing Machines and Social Desire." The symposium took place on 8 March 2019 at Kunsthal Aarhus, with the accompanying exhibition running at Galleri Image from 8 March to 28 April 2019.