Kristoffer Ørum

Kristoffer Ørum

A documentary practice. Every work here has an address and a date.

Local. Copenhagen and Aarhus, mostly.

Digital art.

An artist who makes things up about real places.

Most of it was built on other people's work.

A record-keeper. The website is the work.

Taking its starting point in classical ideas about the end of the world, the exhibition mixed anxiety and faith in the future into a playful soap-opera-like narrative, relocating human fate to mysterious experiments of a distant time. The End of the Universe as We Know It?, 2007

The city of Aarhus serves as both source and subject, remixed through the lens of local imagination and global street culture. Aarhus'er #1, 2025

The work renders the fragile and transient qualities of soap in digital animation, turning an everyday material into a dynamic, projected environment. Soap Particles, 2005

By engaging with the game, players experience how facts and assumed truths can be challenged, restructured and rearranged in playful and experimental ways. Disbelieving Gravity, 2013

Through these monstrous and bizarre creatures, the work addressed our relationship to more familiar creatures and digital systems that we share the modern technological world with. Mundane Monsters, 2023

Each day, the system generated a new composite face from images found via Google’s lists of top search terms. Recognised Faces, 2014

We are collectively searching for new grammars of public discourse. Watershed, 2025

The opening included a performance component set in an alternative past, presenting counterfactual work that narrated fictional relationships between political movements and cultural expression. Mr. Spray, 2024

The installation is accompanied by a series of AI-generated postcards that reimagine Viking life in the style of idealised holiday imagery. The Good, the Lost, and the Beautiful, 2025

Some appear edible, some pneumatic, some built from sound or breath. Monuments of a Fictional Past (Kraków Edition), 2025

The collaboration process involved both artists visiting associations for fieldwork and associations visiting the museum for workshop days that became the foundation for the exhibited artworks. Everyday Heroes, 2019

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 hardware is produced through resource-intensive processes, and even the “local” is entangled in a global infrastructure. None of These Images Are of Me, 2025

The work proposes a less apocalyptic demise where representative buildings don't explode and crash into computer-generated rubble, but instead lose their weight, melt, or are covered with colourful hair. Melting State, 2020

Rather than corporate development, this speculative trajectory imagines ternary computing as evolving through grassroots cultures of experimentation and resistance. Diffused States (Boston), 2025

I do it because I see a critique of the world that too often points outward, as if one could speak from a neutral and elevated place. None of These Images Are of Me, 2025

The exhibition was supported by Novo Nordisk Fonden. Affluence without abundance, 2025

The title refers to multiple forms of diffusion: the technical process of algorithmic image generation; the physical dispersion of paint; and the informal, community-based spread of knowledge and technology. Diffused States (Boston), 2025

Running small, open systems on one’s own hardware provides a degree of autonomy and technological self-determination. None of These Images Are of Me, 2025

The exhibition featured video projections, 3D-printed sculptures, wireless transmissions, two-dimensional works, and an augmented reality component that allowed visitors to view "monsters" inhabiting the gallery through their phone cameras. Mundane Monsters, 2022

A key moment features a deliberately misspelled book title: "Plummed Past" instead of "Plumed Past" (feathered past becomes "blommet fortid" - flowered past in Danish), leading to the presentation of a talking plum. Feathered Misconceptions, 2018

The works form part of Ørum’s ongoing series Även staden drömmer om att vara en annan ("Even the city dreams of being another"), offering glimpses of civic and technological alternatives rooted in joy, memory, and shared invention. Even the City Dreams of Being Another, 2025

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

The project has been discussed in Vice and elsewhere as a reflection on surveillance, aesthetics and identity in the age of algorithmic vision. Recognised Faces, 2014

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’s online component was crafted with HTML, CSS, and Flash as a web-based work. contributors included Maja Zander; Kaspar Bonnén; Stig W Jørgensen; Palle R. Radiant Copenhagen, 2009

By constructing new faces from parts of the most widely circulated images online, Recognised Faces created a snapshot of the constant data collection and algorithmic recognition happening daily on the internet. Recognised Faces, 2014

Together, the elements formed a series of overlapping linguistic and visual displacements. Putin's Nose, 2019

The exhibition continued this approach, combining speculation with a documentary style to produce objects that felt like remnants of possible futures. The End of the Universe as We Know It?, 2007

The exhibition recounted the story of a black magnetic fluid, ferrofluid, that generated forms and figures without human interaction. The End of the Universe as We Know It?, 2007

The project contributed to Epsilon Spires' mission of offering enriching programming of the highest quality while remaining accessible to diverse audiences. Mundane Monsters, 2022

Visitors could observe the browser wandering through familiar and obscure websites, highlighting the fragmented and associative nature of online experience. Auto Navigate My History, 2014

The work combines AI-generated imagery with human-written captions, forming a dispersed narrative around how such systems might emerge—from grassroots tinkering to collectively governed infrastructures and hyper-local training data. Diffused States (Vancouver), 2025

Admitting this is not, in Andrea Fraser’s spirit, a defeat, but a strategy: I would rather acknowledge my own narcissism and greed and use them as material, than pretend I stand outside. None of These Images Are of Me, 2025

A large yellow-green crayfish was positioned in the gallery window. Signal_Crayfish, 2020

Roskilde Parahistory was part of the group exhibition Kurs at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Roskilde in 2009. Roskilde Parahistory, 2009

The wireless transmissions and video projections created an atmosphere where technology and nature intersected in unexpected ways. Mundane Monsters, 2022

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 project challenged both artists and associations to step out of their comfort zones and rethink their practices. Everyday Heroes, 2019

A collective of ten artists, led by Anders Bojen and Kristoffer Ørum, documented these spaces and transformed them into an interconnected web of associations, facts, myths and misunderstandings. Topographies of the Insignificant, 2010

Recognised Faces
Recognised Faces See the work →