Kristoffer Ørum
Twenty years out of art school, and back in it.
A teacher who keeps a studio in order to have something to teach from.
Works with machines that are confidently wrong.
Not local. Boston, Vancouver, Riga, Kraków, Oberhausen, San Francisco.
This text is generated. He decided what it generates from.
Collaborative. Most of it was made with other people.
Signal_Crayfish was commissioned as a book work for "Interspecies Futures ," the first survey of bookworks by international practitioners from bio-art and speculative design fields. Signal_Crayfish, 2021
At the hospital, Untitled — five photographs and an orange chalk drawing in aluminium frames along the corridor, from the perspective of somebody waiting. Leddyrsomsorg / Arthropod Care, 2026
The work set daily life against hypothetical digital physiognomies, using the nose as a means to examine identity and perception. According to the Nose, 2021
Facial features in the collected images were identified using Stasm, an open-source software package for facial recognition originally developed for biometric applications. Recognised Faces, 2014
As Putin's face speaks of Russian identity in the viewer's place, the work demonstrates how digital images today do not simply document reality but actively form identity and power relations. Vladimir's Tongue, 2020
These landmark positions were then used to align, cut and combine eyes, noses, mouths and jawlines into a new synthetic portrait. Recognised Faces, 2014
The project was exhibited at General Public in Berlin, tranzit.sk in Bratislava, Casino Luxembourg in Luxembourg, and Fondazione Volume! in Rome, as well as Künstlerhaus Bethanien in Vienna. Topographies of the Insignificant, 2010
Algorithms originally trained for advertising are repurposed to remix the town’s architecture and stories into new visions of community and possibility. Hvidovre Makes Good Times Better, 2025
The installation asked speculative questions: Can you remember when Prime Minister Helle Thorning played a DJ set in Parliament instead of giving an opening speech? Frihed, Lighed Og Hip-Hop, 2023
The process consistently produced a balance between the familiar and the strange. Mundane Heroics, 2019
Jensen; Ida Marie Hede Bertelsen; Peter Rasmussen; Kasper Hesselbjerg; David Rex; Ulrik Nørgaard; Daphne Bidstrup; Andreas Pallisgaard; and Kristin Haarløv. Radiant Copenhagen, 2009
Bojen and Ørum’s work often moves between science fiction and popular science, with references to comic books, television formats and advertising language. The End of the Universe as We Know It?, 2007
The installation combined digital and physical media to create humorous and inventive takes on contemporary environmental and technological themes. Mundane Monsters, 2022
Leddyrsomsorg / Arthropod Care is a twenty-minute video, one of nine works Ørum showed in FORSTADIER / Precursors — a duo exhibition with Aske Thiberg, curated by Morten K Jacobsen and Heidi Hove. Leddyrsomsorg / Arthropod Care, 2026
One was an animated video about life inside an oyster. Djurs Øhav, 2020
The virtual history book appeared on two projection screens: one mounted on Roskilde’s main square and another inside the exhibition. Roskilde Parahistory, 2009
Over the past year, I have created a series of self-portraits using locally run AI. None of These Images Are of Me, 2025
The work was documented through performance protocols and connected to broader research into facial recognition, identity, and technological surveillance through embodied experience in public space. According to the Nose, 2021
Search for Carrot ExtraTerrestrial Intelligence, 2006, is a PAL DVD video with a duration of 22 minutes, created in collaboration with Anders Bojen. Search for Carrot ExtraTerrestrial Intelligence, 2006
It presented a dystopian scenario where computer-generated body fragments and singing microwave ovens suggested a post-human future. The End of the Universe as We Know It?, 2007
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
This is a form of algorithmic seeing quite different from a human's—one that operates without narrative, hierarchy, or significance. Watershed, 2025
By reinserting them into the same online environments where facial recognition is used for surveillance, marketing and classification, the project subtly disrupted how automated systems construct a digital identity. Recognised Faces, 2014
Mundane Monsters was an interactive digital multimedia exhibition that transformed the gallery at Epsilon Spires into a walk-through experience about the modern relationship between nature and culture. Mundane Monsters, 2022
At Sophienholm it stands outdoors in the park, inside a stone grotto. Affluence without abundance, 2025
The work consists of more than 30 screens distributed throughout the campus, each showing a real-time visualisation of the institution’s invisible infrastructures. A Body Has Many Members, 2012
The goal is not to retell the news but to reorganise its visual material according to a logic other than the ones to which we have become habituated. Watershed, 2025
The work has been presented in lectures at universities, on AI, welfare mythologies and hope through the creative misuse of digital infrastructure. Frihed, Lighed Og Hip-Hop, 2023
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
"Monuments of a Fictional Past" is a project that imagines a past where Soviet edifices dotting the Latvian landscape have been replaced with AI-generated counterparts. Monuments of A Fictitious Past, 2024
It presents language as both infrastructure and interference, existing in plain sight yet obscured within the everyday signals that surround us. Wireless Walnut, 2018
During this struggle of imaginaries Spanien 19C continues to function as an art space, wedged in between building sites of what is to come and fragments of what used to be. Brownfield Wonderland, 2022
The Downloadable Augmented Reality App (available here: https://s.oerum.org/BW) allows one to build one's own messy and unregulated digital architectures, both on and off the building site around Spanien 19C. Brownfield Wonderland, 2022
The project treats everyday objects and routines as sites of discovery and narrative potential, turning personal and mundane experience into shared, speculative material. Day to Day Data, 2008
Her head was made of cardboard squares, and as she walked she produced sad and disturbing sounds audible to late-night strollers and joggers. The Ballehage Woman, 2009
Instead of showing only what is lost when a human is translated into data, these moments offer a new perspective. Speaker 1, 2026
Just as hip-hop DJs once transformed the turntable from a playback device into a creative instrument, this project reimagines Hvidovre’s history as speculative fiction. Hvidovre Makes Good Times Better, 2025
It was accompanied by scholarly publication and received coverage in Danish art press. Signal_Crayfish, 2020
The project also speaks to a transitional moment. Watershed, 2025
Putin's Nose worked at the boundary between object and image, examining how digital images not only register meaning but enter physical space to shape identity and power relations. Putins Nose, 2018