Kristoffer ørum

LEDDYRSOMSORG / ARTHROPOD CARE

Fri, 06 Mar 2026 12:26:40 +0100

LEDDYRSOMSORG / ARTHROPOD CARE is a hand-painted foam sign and 3D-printed sculpture, installed at Midt- og Vestsjællands Hospital as part of FORSTADIER / PRECURSORS. The sign bears the title in Gothic lettering, extended with antennae and legs. In front of it, a large blue woodlouse lies curled and sleeping — a creature that has stepped out of the video and into the hospital corridor. Installation photo: Morten K Jacobsen. Curated by Morten K Jacobsen. The woodlouse was designed using Qwen image and Hunyuan3D algorithms, then printed in modified maize starch across 45 parts on small 3d printers in the studio, assembled by hand and painted in water-based urethane paint. It works the way an image works — you can see what it is supposed to be, and at the same time it is clearly something else: too few legs, a shell that doesn’t match any living species, a blue that belongs to no woodlouse. Close enough to be recognisable, different enough to stay unsettled. A near-woodlouse rather than a woodlouse. Which is perhaps fitting: the real woodlouse is itself a kind of near-creature — a crustacean that left the sea and learned to live on land, carrying the memory of saltwater in a body built for somewhere else. The algorithms prompted the form; the hands that assembled it followed. FORSTADIER / PRECURSORS is a duo exhibition with Aske Thiberg (@askweee), circling the iconography of the healthcare system — the clinical room, the language of care, the institutional forms — with detours into bias in language models, datasets, isolation and alienation. At the gallery, the sculpture meets the video LEDDYRSOMSORG / ARTHROPOD CARE, which imagines a future healthcare system staffed by enormous blue woodlice in place of automation and AI. On view until 11 April 2026. Ringsted Galleriet, Bøllingsvej 15 — open Saturdays 13:00–16:00 or by appointment. Midt- og Vestsjællands Hospital, Bøllingsvej 30 — open weekdays 08:00–15:00 or by appointment. 4100 Ringsted. ringstedgalleriet.dk @ringstedgalleriet #FORSTADIER #PRECURSORS #FrihedLighedOgSymptom #WelfarestateMyths #SurrealSocialRealism #Hunyuan3D #ringstedsygehus #ringsted @statenskunstfond @augustinusfonden @nycarlsbergfondet #lo

The Other Citizenship Test (Den anden indfødsretsprøve)

Fri, 06 Mar 2026 08:57:58 +0100

I have added a new interactive project to my ongoing collection of web-based experiments and prototypes at oerum.org. With the Danish general election coming up on March 24, the latest piece is titled The Other Citizenship Test (Den anden indfødsretsprøve).

To become a Danish citizen, applicants must pass a highly debated multiple-choice test on Danish society, culture, and history. “The Other Citizenship Test” is an unofficial, alternative counter-exam.

Disguised under the fictional government agency SIRI*, this interactive web project perfectly adopts the visual language and rigid logic of the official state test. However, the curriculum has been entirely replaced.

Here, you will not be tested on the kings of the 1700s or which year a specific movie won an Oscar. Instead, you are tested on the histories often left out of the official narrative. The questions cover the early labor movement and women’s rights, centuries of migration that shaped the country, as well as self-organizing, experimental literature, and anti-authoritarian movements.

Furthermore, the test breaks its own rules to question the premise of its existence by asking if it is possible to put national belonging into a formula. The test takes 45 minutes. You need 36 correct answers to pass. Good luck.

go to oerum.org

GØR DIN PLIGT OG KRÆV DIN UDREDNING / DO YOUR DUTY AND DEMAND YOUR EVALUATIO

Thu, 05 Mar 2026 19:27:47 +0100

GØR DIN PLIGT OG KRÆV DIN UDREDNING / DO YOUR DUTY AND DEMAND YOUR EVALUATION is a hand-carved relief in recycled XPS foam, 180 × 80 cm, installed at Midt- og Vestsjællands Hospital as part of FORSTADIER / PRECURSORS. The work is based on a sketch generated using locally run AI models powered by certified green energy. Installation photo: Morten K Jacobsen. Curated by Morten K Jacobsen.

The title and carving rewrite a motto carried on Danish trade union banners from around 1900: “GØR DIN PLIGT OG KRÆV DIN RET” — Do Your Duty and Demand Your Right. Replacing “Ret” (right) with “Udredning” (evaluation) shifts the slogan from the language of solidarity and entitlement to the language of the healthcare system, where the right to care has become a bureaucratic process to be navigated and waited for.

The sketch was generated by a Qwen image model, which then inspired the hand carving — reversing the usual dynamic, where the human prompts the algorithm.

FORSTADIER / PRECURSORS is a duo exhibition with Aske Thiberg (@askweee), circling the iconography of the healthcare system — the clinical room, the language of care, the institutional forms — with detours into bias in language models, datasets, isolation and alienation. At the gallery, the video LEDDYRSOMSORG / ARTHROPOD CARE is accompanied by full-scale sculptures, signs and leaflets. On view until 11 April 2026.

Ringsted Galleriet, Bøllingsvej 15 — open Saturdays 13:00–16:00 or by appointment. Midt- og Vestsjællands Hospital, Bøllingsvej 30 — open weekdays 08:00–15:00 or by appointment. 4100 Ringsted. ringstedgalleriet.dk @ringstedgalleriet

#FORSTADIER #PRECURSORS #FrihedLighedOgSymptom #WelfarestateMyths #SurrealSocialRealism #WAN22 #ringstedsygehus #ringsted @statenskunstfond @augustinusfonden @nycarlsbergfondet #louishansensfond #detobelskefamiliefond #billedkunstrådetringsted #øerneskunstfond #kulturregionmidtogvestsjælland #grossererlffoghtsfond

Ringsted Galleriet og det lange træk

Wed, 04 Mar 2026 11:49:52 +0100

Det er en særlig følelse endelig at udstille på Ringsted Galleriet igen. Jeg var med på en gruppeudstilling for længe siden, men denne gang er det i et duo-format med Aske Thiberg. Selvom vi ikke kendte hinanden indgående før, har det vist sig, at vi deler en overraskende mængde kunstnerisk bagage. Det er netop det, et gennemtænkt program kan: skabe relevante forbindelser på tværs af generationer og udtryk. Mens jeg sætter værker op på hospitalsgangen på sygehuset — blot 150 meter fra galleriet — og taler med ansatte og patienter, bliver det tydeligt, at mange slet ikke kender til stedet. Det er svært at forstå, men det er måske heller ikke det afgørende. For galleriet fungerer allerede. Det har eksisteret i over 40 år, grundlagt i 1982 af tandlægen Mogens Åside og billedkunstneren Maria Nicolaisen, og har formået det sværeste af alt: at bygge en struktur, der kan overleve de enkelte personer, der driver den. Generationsskifter er det, der fælder de fleste kunstnerdrevne steder, fordi de er centeret om enkeltpersoner i stedet for om overdragelige strukturer. Under den nuværende ledelse af Heidi Hove og Morten K. Jacobsen er driften blevet professionaliseret, men den kunstnerdrevne tilgang er intakt — netop fordi det er strukturen, der bærer, ikke personerne alene. Det kuratoriske arbejde er funderet i selve skabelsesprocessen, ikke i administration. Sammenlignet med en etableret kunsthal eller et museum er budgettet minimalt. Men det giver galleriet noget, som institutionerne sjældent har i samme grad: en meget høj kunstnerisk frihed og et kuratorisk mod til at vise arbejder, der ikke følger institutionelle tendenser, men som har egentlig nødvendighed. Her er det stadig praksisnært — kunstneren trækker selv ledninger og sætter op, mens man møder kursister fra undervisningsdelen og de frivillige, der holder stedet i gang. Det er ikke en mangeltilstand, der venter på at blive udbedret. Det er en fungerende praksis. Alt det er allerede politisk. For det politiske og det æstetiske ligger ikke kun i værket. Det ligger også i organisationsformen, i distributionen, i de materielle betingelser kunsten bliver til under. Det er ikke et spørgsmål om, hvorvidt kritisk eller eksperimenterende kunst kan laves inden for store institutioner — det kan den. Spørgsmålet er, under hvilke betingelser den formes, hvem den når, og hvilke kompromiser den indgår. Institutionens egen logik — besøgstal, bestyrelsesgodkendelse, sponsorhensyn, kuratorisk karriereplanlægning — former uundgåeligt det, der kan vises. Nogle institutioner håndterer det bedre end andre. Men tendensen er, at den eksperimenterende kunst enten inddæmmes i et ellers risikoaverst program eller fortrænges af det, der lader sig kommunikere i en pressemeddelelse. Når man udstiller kunstnerdrevet, kommer man i direkte kontakt med alle aspekter af en udstilling: økonomi, logistik, kommunikation, ophængning, publikum. Man er ikke isoleret fra praktikken, politikken og organiseringen, sådan som man ofte er på de større, ressourcerige institutioner, hvor arbejdsdelingen skærmer kunstneren fra alt andet end værket. Det er langt mere arbejde, og det foregår under dårligere vilkår. Men det bibringer også erfaringer og en forståelse af, hvad en udstilling faktisk er, som ville kunne styrke enhver kunstnerisk praksis. Jeg taler ikke udefra: jeg har drevet Captive Portal i København siden 2014, og jeg kender både friheden og sliddet i den model. Jeg sidder samtidig i Statens Kunstfonds legatudvalg og udstiller internationalt — så jeg opererer inden for det samme system, jeg her kritiserer. Det er ikke en modsigelse, men det er en spænding, der er værd at være åben om. Der er en strukturel skævhed i den danske kunstinfrastruktur. De store institutioner — kunsthaller, museer, biennaler — har faste bevillinger, bygninger og lønnet personale. De kunstnerdrevne steder er afhængige af projektmidler, frivilligt arbejde og lokaler, der ofte er midlertidige. Det er ikke et spørgsmål om kvalitet — der laves fremragende arbejde i begge modeller. Men det er et vilkår, der favoriserer institutionel vækst over decentral stabilitet. En stor kunsthal kan råde over tusindvis af kvadratmeter og en professionel bestyrelse. Et sted som Ringsted Galleriet har holdt åbent i over 40 år på en brøkdel af de ressourcer. Begge dele er mulige, men det er kun den ene model, der reproducerer sig selv uden konstant usikkerhed. Det mønster gælder ikke kun i Danmark — det er et generelt træk ved den måde, samtidskunstens infrastruktur er organiseret på, hvor opmærksomhed og midler tiltrækkes af skala. Det, den lokale model kan, er noget andet end det, de store institutioner tilbyder. Billedkunsten er en subkultur. Man skal lukkes ind i den, og den indgang kan ikke bestå af formidling alene. Når jeg hænger værker op på hospitalsgangen i Ringsted, arbejder jeg side om side med ansatte og patienter. Det, de ser, er ikke kun et kunstværk — det er også et arbejde, en praksis, en måde at være i verden på. Den synliggørelse kan ikke produceres i en pressemeddelelse eller en publikumsundersøgelse. Den opstår i nærværet, i det konkrete møde, i det at kunsten ikke er adskilt fra det sted, den vises. Det er det, et lokalt forankret udstillingssted kan: ikke bare vise kunst, men gøre den genkendelig som en livspraksis, som skaber konkrete møder og samtaler med folk, der ikke nødvendigvis har adgang til kunstverdenens etablerede indgange. Ikke ved at sænke ambitionsniveauet eller udelukke de læsninger og praksisformer, der er legitime inden for feltet, men ved at åbne døren uden at kræve et forhåndskendskab, der allerede er på plads. Det betyder ikke, at den kunstnerdrevne model er uden blinde vinkler. Den kan reproducere sine egne æstetiske kredsløb, være netværksafhængig og overse offentligheder, der ligger uden for dens eget felt. Ingen model er neutral. Men den kunstnerdrevne praksis rummer ubrugte muligheder, som er særligt relevante lige nu. Den digitale infrastruktur belønner genkendelighed og algoritmevenlige formater. Samtidig stiger presset fra konservative strømninger, der favoriserer national romantik og kulturel genkendelse frem for eksperiment. Og billedkunsten har en vigende plads i den offentlige diskussion. I det landskab er steder som Ringsted Galleriet ikke bare overlevere fra en ældre model. De er mulige svar på en situation, der endnu ikke har fundet sin form. Kommunen og fondene støtter allerede, og det skal de have anerkendelse for. Men der er en spænding her, som det er værd at holde åben. Steder som Ringsted Galleriet er ikke venteværelser for bedre vilkår. De er allerede det, de skal være — fungerende alternativer til en institutionel logik, der har en tendens til at tjene sin egen reproduktion. Samtidig er det ikke urimeligt at insistere på, at fungerende strukturer får rimelige betingelser. Det lange træk er at forbinde den globale kunstscene med lokale livsverdener og gøre indgangen mindre fremmedgørende for nye publikummer. Det er et arbejde, der tager år, og som Ringsted Galleriet allerede er i gang med. Jeg ville ønske, det arbejde blev højere prioriteret politisk. Og der er et uudnyttet potentiale i, at de større institutioner bruger en del af deres ressourcer på at eksperimentere med deres egen form, samarbejde ud over deres eget kredsløb og engagere sig i de lokale kontekster, de er omgivet af. Det kunne styrke hele feltet — skabe nye spændinger og ændre de blinde vinkler. Det er ikke givet, at det lykkes. Men muligheden er der hvis nogle griber den. Hvis jeg skulle formulere det som et slogan, ville det være: ret blikket mod Ringsted. Der er meget at lære — både som kunstner og som institution.

Notes on Less-Narrative Moving Images

Tue, 03 Mar 2026 17:39:08 +0100

This text is a working document, written as part of my slow return to research after an extended period of medical leave. It is one of several threads I am weaving to better understand my own practice and to make explicit the ideas that underpin it. It lacks the footnotes and references I had intended to include. It is not a finished piece of scholarship but a foundation, an attempt to articulate, in continuous prose, the tradition I place myself within, the theoretical tools I draw on, and the material conditions I work under. It will change as the work progresses. What follows focuses on one concrete strand within that broader project: a lineage of non-narrative moving images and the infrastructural politics that accompany it. For a long time, I assumed that what follows was common knowledge. That if you worked with moving images, you would naturally know the names Viking Eggeling, Oskar Fischinger, and John Whitney Sr.; understand the history of structural film; and recognise that moving images need not tell stories to be meaningful. I assumed that most people working in this space grasped the politics of form and infrastructure as distinct from the politics of content, that when encountering a generative AI video that drifts and morphs, one might situate it within an established formal tradition rather than read it simply as a failed imitation of narrative cinema. I have come to accept that this frame of reference is no longer self-evident. The tradition I come from is deep and ongoing, yet it lacks institutional visibility. It is largely absent from art-school curricula, rarely cited in critical writing, and excluded from most funding frameworks for moving-image practice. Even when such practices exist, they are rarely recognised within galleries, funding categories, or scholarly discourse, leaving this formal-political potential underdeveloped. The following text attempts to render this lineage visible again and to argue that it still holds crucial potential for contemporary image-making. Eggeling’s Symphonie Diagonale (1924) and Hans Richter’s Rhythmus 21 (1921) were produced before narrative cinema had fully consolidated its conventions. These works proposed that film could function like music or painting—temporal, formal, and composed—without being narrative. The image was treated as a plastic material to be organised in time, not as a window onto a fictional world. In Symphonie Diagonale, Eggeling choreographed geometric forms that transform according to visual rules—growth, contraction, rotation, mirroring—applied rhythmically across time. Fischinger extended this principle across three decades, synchronising abstract animation with musical forms. He was not only an artist but an engineer. For the Wax Experiments (1921–26), he constructed a mechanical apparatus that sliced and photographed blocks of wax, generating images through a material process rather than through manual drawing frame by frame. The device was not simply a tool; it was a system whose operation produced imagery within designed constraints. Fischinger’s authorship lay in setting the parameters and conditions; the work emerged from the operation of this engineered situation. That description resonates with the conditions of contemporary generative image-making. When I train a diffusion model on a dataset of objects I have selected and photographed, and run it locally on recycled hardware powered by renewable energy, I am engaged in a structurally comparable practice. I design the system—curate the data, configure the training, assemble the computational infrastructure—and the system produces images. Authorship resides not in producing each individual frame, but in shaping the conditions under which images come into being. The traditional distinction between building the instrument and playing it becomes unstable when instrument and performance are so tightly coupled. Fischinger’s work was political in ways that remain pertinent. He left Nazi Germany in part because the regime demanded figurative, narrative imagery that served propagandistic ends. Abstraction, in this context, was not a retreat from politics but a refusal to let form be subordinated to ideological messaging. Today a comparable pressure is visible: the expectation that moving-image work must carry recognisably political content—revealing, testifying, or exposing injustice—to be considered serious. This insistence on explicit political content reproduces a similar logic of instrumentalisation. Work that resists this mandate, focusing on formal or structural inquiry, is often misread as apolitical. Fischinger’s synthesis of art and engineering also constituted a quiet refusal of industrial divisions of labour. When I operate my own AI infrastructure rather than renting access to commercial APIs, I inhabit a related structural position. The politics is embedded in the practice of integration. Running a model locally, on my own hardware and datasets, constitutes a refusal of the centralised political economy of computation, echoing Fischinger’s return to independent production after unsuccessful engagements with Disney or Paramount. This does not romanticise independence as purity; rather, it keeps the question of who controls the apparatus materially present. Energy use forms part of this equation. Computation is materially expensive, and the environmental burdens of that expense are politically distributed. Running a model on renewable energy from a known grid is not an “ethical decoration”; it is an assertion of responsibility for the entire production chain. To obscure those relations behind a cloud interface is to reproduce the same opacity that characterises industrial image production. Conventional art-historical narratives often suggest that this abstract tradition was simply displaced by narrative cinema. That account overlooks the actual paths through which forms travelled. Fischinger’s influence on Walt Disney’s Fantasia (1940) carried his formal vocabulary directly into mainstream entertainment, shaping visual languages across advertising, educational films, and television graphics. The German avant-garde was not erased; it was absorbed into applied and commercial arts. From Saul Bass’s title sequences to Maurice Binder’s work on the Bond films, and from channel idents to experimental broadcast graphics, modern design practice continued to host sustained formal invention. These spaces privileged rhythm, timing, and abstraction precisely because they could not rely on narrative structure. A motion-graphics designer at BBC2 in the 1990s, crafting idents, was arguably closer in method and spirit to Eggeling than many gallery-based video artists of the same decade. What they lacked was not continuity of practice but a critical vocabulary and institutional framework that would allow them to claim that lineage. Since the 1990s, institutions have tended to privilege the figure of the artist-as-journalist. Politics, within this model, is located in content; form is treated as a vehicle. Within such a framework, structural and rhythmic concerns are coded as “formalist,” and formalism is frequently dismissed as politically neutral. This is a false opposition. The organisation of time and the behaviour of the image as material are political realities in themselves. They shape not only how something is shown, but what can be perceived and thought within the temporal frame the work creates. The documentary mode often reproduces the very hierarchies it seeks to critique. Production structures mirror cinematic labour divisions; roles fragment into director, editor, colourist, sound designer; budgets are allocated according to familiar industry patterns. Common software environments such as Premiere, After Effects, and DaVinci predetermine durations, cuts, and rhythms, contributing to a temporal homogeneity that precedes any specific content. Presets and timelines impose a temporal logic of their own. This occurs long before any specific material is introduced. The result is a narrowing of sensibility: when artists rely on the same tools, conventions, and pacing, the temporal texture of visual art becomes homogeneous. Alternative traditions persist, even if they remain institutionally illegible. In Denmark, the collective Kanonklubben—Jytte Rex, Kirsten Justesen, and others—produced works that examined image production as a collective and material process. Their films operated at the edges of the film world, probing what moving-image practice might look like when detached from the director, the studio, and the hierarchical industrial model. That question—what image-making becomes when its infrastructure is self-determined and collectively negotiated—is precisely what generative video practice reopens today, under different technological conditions. While fine-art consolidated around documentary realism, the desire for non-narrative experience reappeared elsewhere: in ASMR streams, “oddly satisfying” loops, and ambient livestreams. These forms offer duration as atmosphere rather than storytelling. The viewer does not leave their world; they remain within it, accompanied by moving texture. Warhol’s Empire (1964), and the structural films of figures such as Peter Gidal and Malcolm Le Grice, already proposed this relational mode decades earlier: the work as environment rather than as message, a temporal situation one shares rather than a narrative one is carried through. Generative video tools are often criticised for their inability to maintain spatial continuity or character coherence. Yet these so-called failures align closely with the non-narrative tradition. A diffusion model does not depict scenes; it denoises statistical patterns. Each frame is the visible record of a probabilistic process, not the representation of a stable world. To demand of such systems that they behave like classical cinema is to misrecognise their fundamental operations. Generative video has its own formal properties. Its pacing is often homogeneous, set by generation windows rather than editorial decisions, producing a drone-like temporal pulse rather than a cut-driven montage. It tends to produce figuration under pressure: images that are recognisable yet unstable, constantly on the verge of dissolving into abstraction. Figures and spaces almost, but not quite, cohere. These temporal and structural properties create a viewing situation in which the audience’s attention is neither tightly directed nor fully constrained, foregrounding the systemic conditions of image-making—echoing the concerns with rhythm, pattern, and apparatus evident throughout the non-narrative tradition—rather than narrative imperatives. These are not defects; they are defining formal conditions that still lack an adequate critical vocabulary. The lineage extends from Fischinger through John Whitney Sr.’s repurposed anti-aircraft gun director to Lillian Schwartz’s experiments at Bell Labs, where computation became both medium and method. My own trajectory entered this lineage through the Amiga demoscene of the late 1980s—the sine scrollers, oscillating grids, and compact visual routines designed purely to test and display hardware capabilities. Though narratively empty, these Amiga demos followed the same principle of system-defined emergence: images arose through conditions set by the maker rather than through manual framing or storytelling. These works were technically excessive and profoundly formal. When I later encountered Eggeling, the recognition was immediate: the same concerns with rhythm, pattern, and limit-testing were present in both contexts, separated by decades and by institutional framing. That is the position I now try to occupy: building and operating systems in which politics resides in the infrastructure itself. Training a diffusion model on a self-curated dataset of blue objects and running it locally on renewable energy are not peripheral technical choices; they are constitutive of the work, in much the same way that Fischinger’s wax machine was not merely a means but an artwork and argument in its own right. The apparatus, the energy source, and the dataset together define the conditions under which images appear. When I exhibit this material, it is often read as a technical exercise or as a puzzle of representation—an attempt to depict something more or less accurately. That misreading points to a broader condition in which apparatus is treated as neutral and politics is located exclusively in content. Within that regime, the only legible questions are “What does this show?” and “What does it say?” The questions “How is this temporally organised?”, “What system produced it?”, and “Under what infrastructural conditions?” are rarely pursued with the same seriousness. These notes are therefore not only a historical account but part of an attempt to restore a vocabulary for the formal, rhythmic, and infrastructural dimensions of moving-image practice as political phenomena in their own right. The lineage traced here functions as a concrete case: a tradition of non-narrative moving images in which form and infrastructure have long been sites of contestation. This inheritance—a way of apprehending images as material, temporal, and systemic events—remains accessible, even if it is rarely activated by the institutions that currently define serious moving-image work. It includes the rhythms that structure attention, the devices that generate and project imagery, and the energy and labour that sustain those devices. It also encompasses the lineages of practice that have treated these elements as the primary site of meaning.

Opacity, Extraction, Residue

Fri, 27 Feb 2026 12:10:53 +0100

This text is a working document, written as part of my slow return to PhD research after an extended period of medical leave. It is one of several threads I am weaving to better understand my own practice and make explicit the ideas that underpin it. It lacks the footnotes and references I had hoped to include but was unable to at the time of writing. It is not a finished piece of scholarship but a foundation - an attempt to articulate, in continuous prose, the tradition I place myself within, the theoretical tools I draw on, and the material conditions I work under. It will change as the work progresses.

As an artist educated at least partially within what might be called the Western contemporary art tradition - even if that tradition was never the one coherent tradition it sounds like, but rather a series of global trends that always occur in highly local variants - I write from inside the structure I critique. The colonial history of the state I inhabit is one axis of that position, but it does not define me completely. I am also embedded in the institutions I question; I am a parent navigating systems whose internal rules are often hidden; I am someone whose circumstances exceed the frameworks I use here - and who claims the right to that excess. The insistence on opacity found in this text applies to its author as much as to its subjects. What cannot be escaped is the condition of cultural surplus: working within an archive that is already too full, drawing on a tradition whose privileges I inherit even as I question its narratives. The difficulty is not lack but excess. Marginal and collective histories are not absent; they are buried. The task becomes one of salvage. My entire practice - the scavenged hardware, the generated images, and the writing of this text itself - is a project of repair. In Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s terms, this is a reparative orientation: it seeks unused potential within a tradition rather than throwing the tradition away entirely, reading for what can be recovered rather than only for what can be exposed. Awareness of blind spots is not a reason to abandon a history but a precondition for working with it. It is not this text alone that attempts to dream up new worlds, but the daily practice it belongs to. The frameworks invoked throughout function as instruments - provisional tools for making aspects of a situation legible - rather than as authorities to be applied. The Western art historical tradition has long organised itself around a particular figure: the singular creative genius who produces from nothing, whose work is original in the deepest sense - without prior influence or debt. This figure does not just judge art; it structures the entire canon. It determines how influence is traced and how value is assigned. From Vasari’s Lives of the Artists to the contemporary art market, the underlying logic insists on a smooth, unbroken lineage of exceptional individuals whose contributions are entirely new. But this “West” was never one thing, and the canon is not, and has never been, a settled agreement. It is always disputed and contentious, no matter how hard art institutions choose to pretend otherwise. The standard narrative organises a messy, discontinuous history into a neat sequence of movements and breakthroughs. This is an institutional fiction. The history it describes has always included collective, anonymous, and collaborative practices that this structure actively ignores. The Romantic elevation of genius broke from earlier craft traditions; the historical avant-gardes attacked institutions while creating new exceptional heroes; conceptual art attempted to remove the authored object altogether. Each rupture challenged the myth of the genius - and was eventually absorbed by it. The persistence of originality is not an accident. It is maintained through the hard work of institutions whose authority depends on keeping up the illusion of a unified tradition. The question is not why the myth survives being disproven, but how it rebuilds itself after each challenge. Read differently, the margins of this history form a record of alternatives: recurring refusals of linear progress and individual primacy. Their repeated absorption does not nullify them. It indicates that the resource remains available. A reparative practice draws on this archive not out of nostalgia, but as material for present work. The critique of originality also emerges from within the tradition itself. André Malraux proposed that no artwork is ever encountered in isolation. Walter Benjamin argued that the “aura” of an original work was tied to specific physical and economic conditions. Later writers extended this argument: culture is naturally a mix of influences, and “originality” is a bad description of how it is actually made. These critiques share an implicit condition: abundance. They speak from within cultural surplus. When critics celebrate “uncreativity” or the “ecstasy of influence,” they are navigating having too much, not too little. Generative AI redistributes the tensions that these critiques identify but cannot resolve. Everything the models do - extraction, abstraction, removing context, institutional control - has happened before: modernism abstracted, colonial archives classified, museums removed context, photography compressed, print capitalism scaled. What changes with generative systems is not the actions themselves, but their automation, speed, and invisibility. The extraction is continuous; the abstraction is statistical; and the process is built to remain hidden from the people whose material it consumes. I do not claim that this technology is a new form of absolute bondage, but I contend that it echoes older patterns of internal colonisation - in Etkind’s historical sense, describing how empires treat their own populations and cultures as extractable resources. These analogies describe structural patterns of extraction and asymmetry rather than lived colonial violence. I bring several traditions together - surrealism, feminist theories of situated knowledge, networked art, Édouard Glissant’s concepts of relation and opacity, Václav Havel’s post-totalitarian thought, and the speculative methods of pataphysics and speculative fiction - not to force them into a single grand theory, but to ask what each reveals about this redistribution of tensions that the others cannot. My driving claim is this: originality is a positional myth, generative systems make its contradictions newly visible, and situated artistic practice is a way of inhabiting those contradictions without pretending they resolve. Surrealism occupies a useful, if shaky, position in this history. The movement sought to break the strict, rational logic of the Enlightenment, reaching instead toward the collective subconscious. In this sense, the Surrealist impulse was an early attempt at relation; it sought a world where the lone genius was replaced by collaborative methods of making, such as the exquisite corpse. Yet this desire for connection moved toward a specific kind of transparency. The Surrealists wanted to dissolve the ego to reveal a universal human subconscious. In doing so, they frequently treated their encounters with non-Western culture as “discoveries” to be processed by European artists. The “folk” became a resource for the Surrealist project to consume, precisely because the movement’s primary goal was to universalise the irrational - to find a mirror in which the Western subject could see its own hidden depths. These were not the movement’s only blind spots. Surrealism’s systematic reduction of women to muses, and its largely ignored class and race privileges, are part of the same structure: the collective method remained organised around a viewpoint that was male, European, and wealthy, even as it claimed to dissolve the boundaries of the self. To rescue Surrealism’s potential for connection requires acknowledging these limits as constitutive rather than incidental - the same discipline required when working with AI, where datasets carry specific biases and power imbalances, and the work consists of consciously navigating them rather than pretending they do not exist. But to leave it there would reduce Surrealism to simple cultural theft. The movement also operated in direct engagement with anti-colonial thought, emerging most clearly where Surrealism and Caribbean practice met. Aimé Césaire’s encounter with Surrealism in 1930s Paris was a mutual provocation. Césaire found tools in Surrealist techniques that could be turned against the very rationalism that justified colonial authority. Where the European Surrealist sought to make the self universally transparent, the Caribbean subject sought to protect the self against colonial mapping. That Glissant himself emerges from the same Caribbean geography, and was Césaire’s student, means the relationship between these traditions is historically tangled. Surrealism did not simply extract from the colonial world; it was also transformed by it. What Surrealism could not resolve was the question of where the artwork actually comes from. Its techniques - automatic drawing, chance, the found object - were designed to bypass individual intention. But the gallery system still required named authors and solo exhibitions. The tension between collective making and individual credit was never settled; it was managed, and the management always favoured the named artist. This tension returns, amplified, in the context of generative AI. Donna Haraway’s critique of the “god trick” - the claim to see everything from nowhere - offers a different entry into the problem of originality. For Haraway, all knowledge is situated: produced from a particular body, a particular location, and specific material conditions. The “view from nowhere” is always, in practice, a view from somewhere very specific - usually from a position of power. Sandra Harding’s standpoint theory extends this: not all positions see equally well. Knowledge produced from the margins can reveal structures that are invisible from the centre. This is not a claim that marginal perspectives are automatically correct, but that they have access to features of a system that the system’s beneficiaries have no reason to examine. Applied to art, this challenges the genius myth differently than the “everything is a remix” argument. The remix critique says: the genius did not really produce from nothing; the work is a combination of influences. The feminist critique says: the genius is a myth about social position. It claims to speak from nowhere - from pure creativity, from universal value - while actually speaking from a very particular somewhere: usually white, usually male, usually embedded in institutions that reward that particular somewhere as if it were everywhere. This has direct consequences for how we understand generative AI. The large language model also performs a god trick. It consumes material from millions of positions and produces outputs that appear to come from nowhere - from “the machine,” from a system without location. But the model is situated: it lives in a data centre, runs on particular hardware, is trained on data assembled according to specific corporate priorities, and is optimised for specific goals. The outputs carry the marks of that situation even when they appear placeless. The pretence of universality here is not merely false; it is coercive - not because all abstraction is an act of domination (museums, archives, and translations all abstract, and these are not inherently coercive), but because this particular abstraction is enforced without consent, erases the contexts from which the training material was produced, and claims the resulting outputs as general, neutral, and authorless while serving commercial interests. The harm lies in the asymmetry: material is taken, processed, and returned under terms set entirely by the extracting party. The disappearance of the original source is not an accident of scale. It is what the system is designed to accomplish. If Haraway challenges the claim to see from nowhere, Karen Barad’s concept of intra-action challenges the assumption that the observer and the observed exist independently before they meet. For Barad, entities do not pre-exist their interactions; they emerge through them. The instrument of observation is not separate from what is observed; it participates in producing the result. Applied to generative systems, this means that “the model” is not a static object waiting to be used. Nor is “the artist” a stable subject who deploys the model as a tool. Both take shape in the moment of generation - they emerge from the encounter rather than entering it fully formed. But we must be careful. While intra-action is productive for dismantling the myth of the lone genius, applying it too smoothly to generative AI risks political flattening. If humans, machines, and data are simply an entangled, co-creating web, it becomes difficult to name extraction or exploitation. The tech industry would gladly frame mass data-scraping as a natural, post-human “entanglement” to avoid accountability. Therefore, Barad’s framework must be held in tension with the realities of economic power. This becomes clear through her concept of the “cut.” The question “who made this?” assumes that maker and made can be cleanly separated. Barad suggests this separation is not natural but performed - an artificial boundary created by the system of observation itself. In the context of AI, this “cut” - deciding who gets credit, who signs the work, who holds the copyright - is not merely philosophical; it is commercial. The institution performs the cut where it is most profitable, separating “the artist” and “the work” after the fact to produce a sellable unit. The genius myth is, in this light, a particular way of cutting up the world to serve institutional interests. Decades before large models, internet art already confronted a similar tension between collective making and institutional control. The traditions of networked art - from mail art to contemporary digital practices - offer a practical history of what shared authorship looks like when taken seriously. These practices have spent decades working with problems generative AI now makes unavoidable: the distribution of authorship across systems, the reliance on infrastructure the artist does not control, and the instability of the work as it circulates. Cornelia Sollfrank’s “Net.Art Generator” (1999) is an instructive case: a system that scraped images from the web and recombined them algorithmically, producing “artworks” credited to fictional female artists. The project made several things visible at once: the raw material was always already someone else’s; the system’s operations were hidden from the viewer; and claiming authorship is a political act, not a natural fact. More broadly, the history of networked art demonstrates that collaborative, machine-aided making does not automatically destroy the myth of the genius. The art world simply absorbed net.art, assigned individual reputations to its practitioners, and integrated the outputs into the familiar economy of galleries and collections. The same process is underway with AI-generated art: despite the radical distribution of authorship that the technology implies, institutions insistently re-establish individual credit. This is not a failure of the institution to understand the technology. It is the institution doing what it does best: performing the cut that produces “the artist” as a unit of value. The risk - which must be named directly - is that the art market will absorb these new practices as aesthetic style, extracting their visual surface while leaving the extractive infrastructure untouched. An image of a system’s failure, once circulated smoothly through a corporate platform, is no longer a failure. It is product. Édouard Glissant introduces a dimension that the other frameworks do not fully address: the relationship between extraction and cultural production under conditions of deep global inequality, and the politics of who is allowed to remain opaque. A distinction is necessary here. Platform capitalism extracts from its own users; it operates within a shared, if exploitative, economic space. Colonial logic extends extraction through geopolitical asymmetry into contexts that had no part in designing the system and no real power to refuse it. Generative AI operates in both registers simultaneously. A European freelance photographer whose images appear in a training dataset and the oral tradition of a community that never consented to digitisation are both subject to extraction, but the asymmetry between their positions is substantial, and the colonial framework names that asymmetry where “platform capitalism” alone does not. The two frames are not alternatives; they describe overlapping but non-identical dynamics within the same system. Etkind’s concept of internal colonisation adds a third register: the way systems treat their own cultural material as a resource, standardising and rendering it transparent for easier management. In the context of contemporary AI, the “metropole” refers to global tech centres such as Silicon Valley, highlighting that structural asymmetries in computational infrastructure echo patterns of nineteenth-century empire without equating them directly. Glissant’s distinction between filiation and relation addresses the logic that sustains both the myth of originality and its in-house critiques. Filiation is the logic of the root: lineage, origin, a trunk from which branches descend. Relation describes encounter without origin - forms meeting and transforming one another without any serving as the source. Glissant roots this in the specific history of the Caribbean, the Middle Passage, and the plantation. Relation names what happens when people are violently uprooted and must construct meaning from fragments. This process of créolisation produces what did not exist before, but it carries the traces of the violence that made it necessary. His concept of opacité addresses the politics of legibility directly. Colonial ethnography, liberal multiculturalism, and contemporary data systems all share a demand: the other must be rendered classifiable in order to be granted standing. Glissant proposes opacity as a right - the claim that one’s existence should not depend on a system’s ability to categorise it. But opacity runs in both directions: it is also the condition of navigating systems whose internal logics are opaque by design. The opacity of the coloniser maintains power; that of the colonised constitutes resistance. Glissant keeps both in view without collapsing one into the other. Large generative models extract vast quantities of cultural material without consent, homogenising it through optimisation functions that flatten specificity, and centralising infrastructure in ways that impose the centre’s terms across diverse contexts. The term “algorithmic imperialism” names this structural condition - highlighting the asymmetry in technological systems - rather than equating it with lived colonial violence. The colonial framework here operates as an analytic of asymmetry and enforced legibility, not as a claim of equivalence between computational extraction and historical colonial domination. In this context, opacity - in Glissant’s sense - names the refusal to be fully tokenised: the space where a culture’s interiority resists being rendered as training data. But “generative AI” is not a singular actor. The corporate API, the open-source model, the diffusion system, the small fine-tuned model running on local hardware - these occupy very different positions, and the colonial analogy applies with varying force. Treating them as identical would reproduce exactly the flattening the argument criticises. Describing what models do to their training data as “forced créolisation” is provocative but requires qualification. In Glissant, créolisation involves unpredictability, irreducibility, and emergence; AI training, in contrast, produces statistical compression that homogenises situated knowledge, meaning the analogy applies to extraction rather than emergent relation. The model does not produce relation in Glissant’s sense; it produces abstraction - taking material that was situated and opaque and rendering it as weights in a network. What is lost in this process is not “data” in any neutral sense but the specific conditions under which the material meant something: the community that produced it, the conventions it operated within, the situated knowledge it carried. The latent space of a generative model is, in this sense, the metropole’s map - not in the territorial sense of colonial cartography, but in the epistemological sense: both impose a system of comparability that the mapped material did not generate and cannot refuse, rendering diverse forms of knowledge legible only in terms the mapping system defines. It is a topology in which meaning is reduced to distance, and to be “known” by the system is to be assigned a coordinate relative to everything else the system has ingested. This is the transparency demand in its purest mathematical form - the refusal to let an object exist on its own terms, forcing it instead into a comparative metric where proximity is determined by the system’s training, not by the material’s own logic. Does the model produce true connection, or only abstraction? In its dominant commercial configurations, AI abstracts rather than relationally transforms - not because computation is inherently incapable of producing emergence, but because the systems as currently built and governed optimise for output, not for the situated encounter that relation requires. This distinction should not be drawn too sharply. All relation involves abstraction; all modelling reduces entropy; human cognition itself compresses and schematises in ways that are not categorically different from what the model does. Compression is not inherently harmful. It is how we think at scale - taxonomy, classification, generalisation are all lossy processes, and they are also what makes navigating complexity possible. What is lost in compression is the price of increased capacity, and that trade-off is often productive. The political question is not whether to compress but who controls the compression, what gets designated as noise, and whether the people whose material is compressed have any say in the terms. Human cultural synthesis is embedded in communities, subject to contestation, and answerable to the people whose material it transforms. Statistical compression in a generative model is answerable to a loss function. The absence of social embedding is what makes the model’s abstraction politically distinct, not some essential difference between computational and human cognition. And yet the outputs are not entirely reducible to their mathematics. This is where “hallucination” becomes relevant. The tech industry uses the term to label outputs that are factually wrong, framing them as failures to be fixed. But the model is not trying to tell the truth and failing. It is producing what is statistically plausible. It is indifferent to whether its outputs correspond to anything real. What we call a hallucination is the visible surface of that indifference. These distortions are not evenly distributed. Material that is heavily represented in the training data - the visual culture of the wealthy West, Standard English, commercial photography - survives the compression relatively intact. Material that was rare, local, or structurally unlike the dominant patterns gets distorted much more severely. This is lossy compression as political fact. In computer science, lossy compression works by discarding what the algorithm considers redundant. But what registers as noise to the system is often precisely the opacity that Glissant seeks to protect. The system’s definition of “noise” is not neutral. It is a hierarchy encoded as an engineering decision. The hallucination marks the point at which this hierarchy encounters material it cannot digest. This is not rebellion by the data. It is structurally produced evidence of the system’s epistemological limits. Haraway’s situated knowledge and Glissant’s opacity converge here. The hallucination is the point at which the model’s false universality becomes legible - where its claim to produce from nowhere encounters material that was most stubbornly somewhere, and the encounter leaves marks. Both the feminist critique and the postcolonial critique identify the coercive force of imposed universality, and both insist on attending to what that universality cannot contain. The difference is in what they emphasise: Haraway foregrounds the erasure of position; Glissant foregrounds the erasure of opacity. Together they describe two aspects of the same operation. Artistic practice can work in these residues deliberately. The reparative impulse described at the outset finds its structural counterpart here: the recuperation of what generative systems discard. Just as the standard art historical narrative writes out collective and non-linear practices, the corporate AI pipeline optimises away the outputs that do not conform to its definition of success. In both cases, what is discarded is not without value; it is without value to the system that discarded it. The practice of attending to residues applies the same method to both objects - the tradition and the tool. Here two further traditions become relevant. Pataphysics - Alfred Jarry’s “science of imaginary solutions” - provides a method for treating the model’s failures not as errors to be corrected but as data about the system’s assumptions, to be examined with the same rigour one would apply to any other empirical phenomenon. Speculative fiction, from its earliest forms through Afrofuturism and contemporary climate fiction, offers the practice of constructing counterfactual worlds that illuminate the present by displacing it. Together they describe a mode of working that is neither credulous (accepting the model’s outputs as given) nor purely critical (rejecting them as compromised) but diagnostic: using what the system produces, including what it produces wrongly, as material for understanding what the system is. The speculative historical image - a counterfactual document, an impossible architecture, a scene that shimmers between plausibility and impossibility - makes visible the system’s epistemological indifference and the unevenness of its compressions. The viewer cannot fully resolve what they are looking at, and that irresolution, worked with deliberately, becomes a way of refusing both the myth of the original and the false transparency of the generated. But the counterfactual image is not only diagnostic. It is generative. The true lies of speculative practice - images of pasts that did not happen and presents that do not yet exist - make it possible to imagine other futures and other infrastructures. They are grounded in enough fact to produce a slight plausibility, and contain enough strangeness to open avenues of thought that settled narratives have closed. A speculative image of a Danish healthcare system organised around principles that never took hold, or a labour movement whose iconography developed along paths history foreclosed, does not claim to depict what was or what is. It claims that things could have been otherwise, and that this “otherwise” is not exhausted - that dormant traditions can be reactivated, not as nostalgia but as material for reimagining what comes next. This is the reparative project applied to the future as well as the past: recovering unspent potential not only from the archive of what was made but from the archive of what was almost made, nearly thought, not quite realised. If the question of originality is also a question of position, then the physical realities of generative practice cannot be treated as incidental. I find an ally here in Václav Havel’s post-totalitarian thought. Havel describes a system where participation in the official lie - even through small acts of conformity - is how power is maintained. The shopkeeper who places a government slogan in the window does not believe it; the system does not require belief, only compliance. To refuse the slogan is not to overthrow the system. It is to “live in truth” - to maintain a sphere of interiority that the system’s demand for legibility cannot fully penetrate. Denmark occupies a double position in this landscape: historically a colonial metropole with past territories in the Caribbean and Greenland, yet today a peripheral actor within US-dominated digital infrastructures. This shapes what forms of extraction, agency, and opacity are legible from here. Yet I am not the state I inhabit; my own practice requires its own opacity, distinct from national histories. I am situated within this context, but I am not reducible to it. My practice involves maintaining a scavenged 3090 GPU - hardware repurposed to run a localised AI model on renewable energy. Running models locally shifts governance, accountability, energy relations, and dependency. But I must not romanticise this hardware. A GPU is not an innocent object; it is the physical condensation of global extraction, relying on mineral mining, exploited labour, and massive ecological expenditure. Refusing the corporate cloud does not erase the extraction baked into the silicon. “Living in truth” in this context cannot mean claiming purity or complete escape from the system. It means taking material responsibility for a compromised position rather than hiding behind the seamless interface of a corporate API. The intervention is positional, not structural. A locally run model still carries the biases of its training data; it still operates within the same optimisation logic. What changes is the governance: who decides what runs, what is kept, what is discarded. This prevents the local setup from becoming a false salvation narrative. It does not wash away the extractive history embedded in the model’s architecture, but it establishes a different position from which to engage. The value lies precisely in the friction: partial, physically situated, and accountable to its own context. Not a utopia, but a specific ground from which to speak and make. When my model fails to accurately generate specific Danish labour iconography, the failure is not a bug. It is the point at which the physical limit of my position becomes visible - where the system’s indifference collides with material it was never trained to understand. I do not claim that working locally transforms global infrastructure. It does not. What I claim is more modest: working locally preserves the residues that corporate platforms are structurally incentivised to eliminate. Each software update patches out the hallucinations. The situated practitioner treats them as material - as evidence of what the system’s compression could not absorb. This preservation is precarious. Glitch aesthetics were absorbed into mainstream design almost immediately; corporate systems routinely incorporate user anomalies to improve their corrections. But the precariousness is part of the point: the goal is not permanent preservation but maintaining residues for as long as they remain legible. They function as a counter-archive - evidence of what the system cannot contain. Without such evidence, the system’s compressed account becomes the only account available. Beyond individual practice, there is the question of lateral knowledge-sharing. When communities share tactics for navigating opaque AI systems - fine-tuning small models for local languages, pooling hardware - they create spaces where multiple opacities coexist, and margins learn from margins without needing to explain themselves to the centre. Perhaps the most concrete form this takes is the creation of small data - curated, specific datasets intentionally withheld from the corporate pipeline, maintained by the communities that produced them. Where Big Data extracts and dissolves context, small data is bounded, situated, and opaque by intention. But small datasets are not inherently virtuous; they can reproduce local hierarchies, encode exclusions, and serve as tools for gatekeeping. Situated knowledge is not a guarantee of justice. What makes small data politically significant is not that it is pure, but that its biases are legible and its creators are accountable. It makes responsibility possible. The several frameworks brought together here do not agree with one another, and that disagreement is productive. Surrealism demonstrates how the myth of the lone genius persists even within practices designed to refuse it. Feminist epistemology insists that the question “who makes?” is inseparable from the question “from where?” - and that imposed universality is not merely false but coercive. Networked art provides a practical history of distributed authorship encountering institutional re-individualisation. Glissant’s concepts of relation and opacity address the politics of extraction under geopolitical asymmetry and the right to withhold from systems that demand legibility. Barad’s intra-action destabilises the entities - artist, model, output - that the other frameworks still tend to take as given. This creates a genuine tension within the essay’s own argument: if entities are co-constituted through intra-action, how stable are the distinctions between extractive system and relational practice, between abstraction and relation, on which the political critique depends? The answer is that these distinctions are not ontologically fixed but asymmetrically structured - the system and the practitioner are co-constituted, but the terms of that co-constitution are not set equally. The extraction is designed; the relation is insisted upon against the design. Barad does not dissolve the political claim; she relocates it from the level of pre-existing entities to the level of the processes that produce them. Havel reminds us that the power of the powerless lies in the refusal to be rendered transparent - that maintaining a sphere of truth within a system built on compliance is itself a political act, however modest. None of these resolves the core tension of working with generative systems, which should be stated directly: the dominant generative infrastructures are centralising, epistemologically indifferent to the meaning their material once carried, and built on extraction at every level. Artistic practice that engages with them can nonetheless be grounded, accountable, and attentive to what the systems cannot contain. The system is extractive in structure. The practice can still be relational in orientation. These two facts coexist without synthesis. But relational orientation is not immune to capture. The institutional apparatus will aestheticise the traces of systemic failure with the same efficiency it brought to appropriation art and net.art if the practice remains only at the level of the image. The defence is not purity - there is no outside position - but the insistence on tying the work to material conditions that resist full aestheticisation. These are not guarantees. They are frictions. The generated image that trembles between document and fiction, the counterfactual history that disturbs a settled narrative: these are not proofs of a new genius, nor confirmations that everything is remix. They are markers of a process that is partial in its reach and unresolved in its politics. To work with them honestly is to refuse the myth of the singular creator without accepting the false universal that would replace it, and to insist that the conditions of production - who extracts, from whom, through what infrastructure, under whose terms - are never incidental to what is produced. But diagnosis alone does not account for why anyone would persist in making work under these conditions. The answer is not only political. If we must live with extraction - and for now we must, since there is no position entirely outside it - then the question becomes how we still find beauty, or some semblance of it, within compromised circumstances. To insist on beauty is to insist that pleasure and joy remain among our goals, rather than efficiency, production, or the accumulation of wealth. The speculative image that shimmers between document and fiction, the counterfactual that opens a foreclosed history, the moment where the model produces something it was not trained to produce and the result carries unexpected weight: these are not only evidence of epistemological limits. They are also, sometimes, beautiful - not despite the compromise but within it, as a quality that emerges from the friction between what the system can produce and what the practitioner insists on looking for. Beauty under these conditions is not purity. It is attention: the capacity to find in residues something that matters aesthetically and not only critically. Without this dimension the practice becomes merely diagnostic, and diagnosis without care for what is made is another form of extraction - the instrumentalisation of the work in the service of the argument about the work. The reparative project is not only an intellectual commitment. It is also an aesthetic one: the conviction that something worth attending to can still be made from within systems that are indifferent to that possibility. But refusal alone is not enough to sustain a practice. The goal, stated plainly, is to nurture traditions and ways of thinking that live in the margins - to keep alive unrecognised beauty and out-of-favour ideas, locally and patiently, until they become relevant again. This is not a solitary project. It is one contribution among many from people who find activities and ideas outside the mainstream worth preserving. The work is parapolitical: planting ideas and making them visible through images and objects so that situated, sustainable ways of thinking might re-enter broader circulation - not by force but by the slow accumulation of things that exist and can be encountered. Part of this work involves bridging domains that rarely speak to one another. The tacit knowledge of craft - the material understanding that comes from building, coding, printing, installing - and the tacit knowledge of programming share more with each other than either shares with academic discourse or policy debate. Yet academic and political institutions are where decisions about technology, culture, and funding are made. The practice sits between these domains, translating in both directions: bringing the concrete, situated knowledge of making into spaces that tend to deal in abstractions, and bringing the analytical frameworks of theory into a practice that would otherwise remain illegible to the institutions that shape its conditions. This translation is itself a form of the reparative project - it insists that craft knowledge and theoretical knowledge are not separate orders of understanding but different registers of the same attention to how things are made, by whom, and under what terms. These are not hypothetical traditions. The Amiga demoscene and warez culture developed, from the 1980s onward, a practice in which programming skill was turned toward aesthetic ends - crack intros, demos, 64k intros - producing work that was technically rigorous and often beautiful, distributed through informal networks with their own competitions, critical vocabularies, and pedagogies, entirely outside institutional art. The demoscene worked inside proprietary systems and turned the act of navigating their constraints into a creative practice; the parallel to working within extractive AI infrastructure is direct. Live-action role-playing constitutes a collective, embodied form of speculative practice: participants construct counterfactual worlds and inhabit them physically, together, in an active disbelief of the given reality that is structurally close to what this essay calls the “true lies” of speculative image-making. Crafting traditions - textile, ceramic, woodwork - have always transmitted aesthetic and material knowledge through practice rather than theory, maintaining standards of excellence and communities of critique without recourse to institutional validation. And what might be called the folk art of AI - the millions of people now engaging directly with image generation, learning through practice about composition, style, distribution, and the politics of representation - constitutes a new form of non-institutional visual literacy. These practitioners learn to make and critique images by making them, developing judgement through direct engagement with the tools rather than through formal education. What these traditions share is that they produce knowledge - technical, aesthetic, critical - through practice and community rather than through credentialled instruction, and that institutional frameworks have consistently failed to recognise them as forms of knowledge at all. They are part of the reservoir. The reparative project includes them. The solidarity this practice seeks is both local - grounded in specific communities, specific infrastructure, specific contexts - and lateral, margin to margin, building resilient hope across distances without requiring alignment on everything. This is what the reparative project looks like in practice: not a theory of resistance but the daily work of making and maintaining, in the conviction that what is kept alive locally can matter beyond the local, and that the reservoir of non-conformity is replenished by those who add to it. I do not yet know if I will be successful in planting these ideas or images of change. That is the hope. The interpretation of the work does not belong to the artist; it lies with the viewer, and their choice to take up - or ignore - the materials and ideas offered. To accept this is to accept that art is an offer, not a set of instructions. Once the work leaves the local hardware and enters the world, it is out of my hands. What remains, after these refusals, is not a programme but a practice: situated navigation within opaque systems, the maintenance of an archive the system would prefer to erase, and the patient attention to residues as evidence of what no single framework, and no single system, can fully contain. An image of trembling, preserved outside the pipeline - for now, and without guarantees - is still trembling. Whether it sparks a larger change is not for me to decide. That is enough to begin with.

Om en anmeldelse

Thu, 19 Feb 2026 09:20:51 +0100

Jeg er nervøs for at skrive dette. Mathias Kryger er en af de få anmeldere, der regelmæssigt skriver om kunst i de store danske aviser, og jeg vil gerne have mere kunstkritik, ikke mindre. At kritisere en af dem, der rent faktisk gør arbejdet, er ubehageligt - især fordi jeg selv stiller ud og ved, at næste gang kan det være min udstilling, han anmelder. Men netop derfor er det nødvendigt at tale om, hvad kunstkritik gør, og hvad den kan gøre. At jeg har valgt en anmeldelse af Isa Genzken, er ikke tilfældigt. Genzken er ikke en sårbar lokal kunstner eller en god kollega, hvis karriere min kritik kunne skade. Hun er en af de mest anerkendte kunstnere i europæisk samtidskunst. Det er anmeldelsen og den kritiske praksis, den repræsenterer, jeg vil diskutere.

Krygers anmeldelse starter med en bemærkning om, at Genzken “klæder sig ekstremt godt". Det er ikke en tilfældig detalje. Det er anmelderen, der viser sin evne til at genkende den rigtige stil - i tøj, ligesom i kunst. Det sætter tonen for resten: en tekst, hvor det at vide, hvad man skal mene om Genzken, er selve pointen.

Påstanden om, at alle gode kunstnere misunner Genzken, er ikke en kunstkritisk observation. Den er en retorisk lukning: Er du uenig, er du ikke en god kunstner. En subjektiv vurdering bliver til objektiv sandhed ved at gøre uenighed til et tegn på manglende kvalitet hos den uenige snarere end hos påstanden. Og listen over MoMA, Venedig, Documenta og Stedelijk fungerer som argument i sig selv - som om institutionel anerkendelse er bevis på kvalitet snarere end bevis på, at en kunstner er blevet fuldt absorberet i et system, der har investeret tungt i hendes navn og har en direkte interesse i at opretholde det. Når Den Frie nu viser hende, er det ikke en opdagelse, men en forsinkelse i at følge trop.

Anmeldelsen forholder sig aldrig til den økonomi, der bestemmer, hvilke kunstnere der ender i denne position. Genzken er ikke bare en vigtig kunstner - hun er et dyrt brand, og de institutioner, der viser hende, har investeret i det og har interesse i at beskytte investeringen. Det er muligt at skrive om Genzken uden at lave en markedsanalyse, men at behandle hendes position som udelukkende et resultat af kunstnerisk kvalitet kræver, at man aktivt ser bort fra de økonomiske strukturer, der har produceret og vedligeholder den position. Det kunne man i det mindste anerkende.

Genzken-skulpturerne har cirkuleret på biennaler og institutioner i årtier. Jeg har selv mødt dem gentagne gange - mannequindukkerne, tårnene, collagerne - og jeg skriver indefra det kredsløb, jeg beskriver. Men det forpligter også til ærlighed: At møde dem igen på Den Frie er ikke en åbenbaring. Anmeldelsen behandler genkendelighed som vigtighed, men man kan spørge, om det ikke snarere er et tegn på, at et formsprog er så fuldt institutionaliseret, at det ikke længere producerer friktion - kun genklang fra dem, der allerede ved, hvad de skal mene.

Og det er her, mit egentlige problem med udstillingen melder sig. Genzkens værker er bygget af verden - magasinforsider, kontanter, masseproducerede dukker, arkitektoniske modeller, medicindoseringsæsker. Det er materialer, der bærer slid, brug, cirkulation. Men i Den Fries hvide rum, isoleret fra den verden, de kommer fra, virker det hele frosset. Den henkastede finish, der skal signalere spontanitet og ligegyldighed - det skæve, det tilfældige, det upolerede - fremstår ikke spontant. Det fremstår smagfuldt. Genkendeligt og lidt smart. Og det er præcis der, jeg mister kontakten. Jeg står i rummet og kan se alt det, der skulle påvirke mig, men det rører mig ikke. Det smagfuldt lækre lægger sig som en hinde over værkerne og gør dem sikre.

Jeg ved ikke med sikkerhed, om det er værkerne, der har ændret sig, eller om det er mig. Måske er det rummet - den hvide kube, der neutraliserer materialer, som engang var urolige. Måske er det tiden - tredive års institutionel cirkulation, der har slebet kanterne af. Eller måske er min egen sensibilitet flyttet til et sted, hvor denne form for forstyrrelse ikke længere registreres. Men uanset årsagen er det et spørgsmål, der er værd at stille, og det er et spørgsmål, anmeldelsen hverken stiller eller ser. Værkerne begynder i stedet at fungere i et andet register - tættere på design end på den forstyrrelse, de engang producerede. Det er ikke en nedvurdering. Design er sin egen disciplin med sin egen intelligens. Men det er et andet spørgsmål, man stiller til tingene.

Tag for eksempel værkerne med kontanter klistret på lærreder. Eurosedlerne flaprer fra fladen, og Kryger skriver, at han kan “mærke smerten dybt i mig over, at penge regerer alt i verden". Men det er jo netop den slags sætning, der lukker for det interessante. Hvad sker der faktisk i mødet mellem en euroseddel og et lærred i 2026? Kontanter er ved at forsvinde fra hverdagen - de er allerede næsten eksotiske objekter. Genzken klistrede dem på, da de stadig var almindelige. Hvad betyder det, at de nu har skiftet status fra hverdag til relikvie? Hvad gør det ved værket? Er det stærkere eller svagere? Det er præcis den slags spørgsmål, en anmelder kunne stille i stedet for at rapportere sin egen smerte.

Og det er ikke, fordi der mangler noget at tale om. Selv når jeg selv står uberørt i rummet, er der så meget, der er interessant at tænke over: hvordan Genzkens måde at sammensætte masseproducerede objekter på forholder sig til den visuelle verden, vi alle bor i nu - en verden af overflader, branding, feeds, hurtig sammenstilling. Hendes collagepraksis foregreb på mange måder den æstetik, vi i dag er omgivet af, og det rejser spørgsmålet om, hvorvidt værkerne stadig forstyrrer den visuelle orden eller om de er blevet indhentet af den. Det er samtaler, der kunne føres med udgangspunkt i denne udstilling. At jeg ikke er grebet, er ikke det samme som, at der ikke er noget at gribe fat i. Materialet er der, men Kryger bruger sin spalteplads på at fortælle os, at vi bør være imponerede i stedet for at give os redskaber til selv at se, hvad der er på spil. Det er ikke det samme som, at læseren nødvendigvis lader sig imponere - men anmeldelsen tilbyder ikke meget andet at gøre.

Biografien bruges som kunstkritik. Medicindoseringsæskerne med navnet “Genzken-Richter” og det tidligere ægteskab med Gerhard Richter bliver dramatiske omdrejningspunkter. At læse biografiske elementer i et værk er legitimt, men her glider det over i en fortælling om kunstnerens liv, som det egentlige indhold. Genzkens demens nævnes i forbifarten - “siges det” - uden kilde og uden refleksion over, hvad det indebærer at skrive en persons kognitive tilstand ind i en offentlig tekst. “Siges det” er en formulering, der giver dækning uden ansvar - den placerer informationen som almen viden og fritager anmelderen fra at tage stilling til, om den hører hjemme i en anmeldelse. Og den tjener en narrativ funktion: den lukker kunstnerskabet ned som afsluttet, et komplet livsværk, man kan besigtige som monument. Richter selv forbliver et uudtalt referencepunkt - en af de mest markedsværdifulde kunstnere i verden - hvis navn tilføjer yderligere aura til Genzken-fortællingen uden, at det nogensinde problematiseres.

Den eneste egentlige æstetiske karakteristik af, hvad værkerne gør, er, at de udgør “et poetisk udsagn af fragmenter". Det er en vending, der lyder som analyse, men kan anvendes på næsten al samtidskunst, der arbejder med collage eller assemblage. Det er sproget, der undgår at sige noget konkret. For der er noget at sige om Genzkens materielle tænkning, om den specifikke måde, hun forstyrrer forholdet mellem omsorg og fremmedgørelse, om hvad det gør, når masseproducerede objekter trækkes ind i et æstetisk felt. Anmeldelsen gør ikke det arbejde. Den genfortæller udstillingen og bekræfter en allerede etableret fortolkning.

Strukturen i anmeldelsen er i sig selv en del af problemet. Den begynder med “du får ikke chancen igen” og slutter med demens og tavshed. Genzkens karriere rammes ind som en afsluttet og uangribelig størrelse, der kun kan hyldes, ikke diskuteres. Frygtstyringen i “du er selv ude om det” lukker for den uenighed, der kunne producere en mere interessant samtale om, hvad disse værker faktisk gør i 2026, i en kontekst, der er markant forskellig fra den, de opstod i.

Det er muligt, at Kryger arbejder i et populistisk register for at gøre kunstkritik tilgængelig. Men tilgængelighed kræver ikke, at man opgiver præcision - den kræver, at man giver læseren noget at se, som de ikke så før. Det kræver, at anmelderen er til stede i værkerne snarere end i fortællingen om dem. Helt konkret: det kunne betyde at beskrive, hvad der sker i mødet mellem materiale og rum - hvordan en euroseddel opfører sig på et lærred, hvordan en mannequindukke forandres af at få en plastikrose stukket i hovedet, hvordan et tårn af mdf med magasinudklip klistret på sig forholder sig til den arkitektur, det forestiller. Det er muligt uden akademisk jargon. Det kræver blot en vilje til at se og til at lade sin egen usikkerhed eller modstand være en del af beskrivelsen.

Den kunst, der faktisk laves i Danmark - i kunstnerdrevne rum, i periferien af det etablerede, i projekter, der ikke har internationale institutioner i ryggen - får sjældent anmeldelser i de store dagblade. Det er ikke tilfældigt. Den populistiske kunstkritik og de kanoniserede institutioner har brug for hinanden - de producerer i fællesskab en forestilling om, at kunst er noget, man tager imod fra de rette steder, formidlet af de rette stemmer. Der foregår et stort og varieret kunstliv i Danmark, som aldrig møder den kritiske opmærksomhed, der kunne udvikle det i dialog med kritikken. Resultatet er, at dansk kunstkritik ved konsekvent at orientere sig mod de internationale institutioner som eneste målestok gradvist bliver dårligere til at se, hvad der faktisk foregår omkring den. Ikke fordi det lokale er bedre, men fordi det aldrig bliver læst med den samme seriøsitet. Og det er i den dialog - mellem det kanoniserede og det ukanoniserede, mellem det sikre og det usikre - at kunstkritikken kunne blive det, den burde være: ikke en anbefaling, men en undersøgelse.

politiken.dk/del/8JTPJ… #stuffiwonderabout #tingjegspørgermigselvom

FORSTADIER / PRECURSORS

Sun, 15 Feb 2026 23:11:48 +0100

FORSTADIER / PRECURSORS opens Saturday 28 February at Ringsted Galleriet and Midt- og Vestsjællands Hospital in Ringsted. The exhibition is a duo show with Aske Thiberg ( @askweee ), circling the iconography of the healthcare system — the clinical room, the language of care, the institutional forms — with detours into bias in language models, datasets, isolation and alienation. In the gallery, Thiberg has built a room within the room. Behind it, my video Arthropod Care / Leddyrsomsorg imagines a future healthcare system where enormous blue woodlice have taken over the roles otherwise assigned to automation and AI. They are strange enough to disturb, but present enough to raise the question of whether this could actually be an answer. At the hospital, they step out of the screen and into reality as scaled-up sculptures, signs and leaflets. Opening 28 February, 12:00–16:00. On view until 11 April 2026. Ringsted Galleriet, Bøllingsvej 15 / Midt- og Vestsjællands Hospital, Bøllingsvej 30, 4100 Ringsted. ringstedgalleriet.dk @ringstedgalleriet #FirhedLighedOgSymptom #WelfarestateMyths #WAN22 #SurealSocialRealism #ringstedsygehus #ringsted @statenskunstfond @augustinusfonden @nycarlsbergfondet #louishansensfond #detobelskefamiliefond #billedkunstrådetringsted #øerneskunstfond #kulturregionmidtogvestsjælland #grossererlffoghtsfond

Ordinsekter (Word Insects)

Sun, 15 Feb 2026 16:34:09 +0100

My interactive text piece features words that crawl in from the edges of the screen to form sentences at its centre. Each letter has legs that animate as it moves. The words scatter when you touch them, fleeing from the cursor, then slowly return to their positions when left alone. Click, and they fade as they crawl back toward the edges, making way for the next sentence. The work is part of Leddyrsomsorg, a project imagining a future Danish healthcare system where giant blue woodlice replace AI and automation. The crawling text contrasts human separation from the world with the woodlouse’s integration into it. We build walls, wear shoes, make surfaces easy to clean. The woodlouse turns toward the world. We become ill from what we create. The woodlouse carries heavy metals in its body, bearing what we cannot tolerate. We drink through glass. The woodlouse draws moisture directly through tubular legs. Each sentence proposes that the boundaries we construct—between clean and dirty, inside and outside, self and environment—are boundaries the woodlouse does not recognise. The words arrive from beyond the visible frame, assemble themselves into readable lines, then disperse when disturbed. This is a small model of how meaning gathers and scatters, how language crawls toward coherence only to flee when examined too closely, how sentences are temporary congregations of smaller creatures. The final sentence in the rotation states: This text is about the woodlouse. But the woodlouse is not about this text. It crawls on under the stone, indifferent to my considerations. The interface uses vanilla JavaScript with no external libraries. Each letter is a separate DOM element with animated legs. Letter positions blend between spread formation for readability and trailing formation during movement. Individual letters scatter from touch independently of their word. Words meander as they approach their targets, never travelling in straight lines. All processing runs client-side. Available in both Danish and English. oerum.org

Om at have en situeret teknologisk kunstpraksis

Thu, 12 Feb 2026 10:05:33 +0100

Hvis man ikke anerkender den klassiske heltefortælling om kunstverden som en fremadskridende bevægelse af geniale individer og læser traditioner anderledes end konsensus, er det klart, at man bliver nødt til at forklare sig. Ligeså hvis man reparativt søger at genvinde dele af kunsthistoriens ubrugte potentiale frem for at kassere hele traditioner. At genvinde surrealismen indebærer at anerkende dens blinde vinkler – bevægelsens systematiske reduktion af kvinder til muser og objekter, dens uadresserede klasse- og raceprivilegier – uden at blive blændet af dem. Det er den samme bevægelse, der kræves i arbejdet med AI-billedgenerering: datasættene bærer på bestemte bias, bestemte udeladelser og bestemte magtforhold, og det kunstneriske arbejde består ikke i at foregive, at de ikke er der, men i bevidst at omgås dem – synliggøre dem, forskyde dem, bruge dem produktivt. Bevidstheden om blinde vinkler er forudsætningen for at kunne arbejde med materialet, ikke en grund til at opgive det. Denne tekst beskriver en billedkunstnerisk praksis, der bruger AI-billedgenerering, lokal infrastruktur og spekulativ tænkning til at undersøge, hvordan teknologi og samfund former hinanden. Den trækker på traditioner fra surrealismens kollage over patafysik og spekulativ fiktion til networked art, og den bruger teori som værktøj snarere end autoritet.

Selvom teknologisk kunst tit beskrives som ny, og kunstverden er fuld af discipliner defineret af deres materialebrug frem for strategier og indhold, er mit arbejde som billedkunstner forankret i en tradition, der løber fra surrealismen gennem patafysikken og den spekulative fiktion til networked art. Kategorien “teknologisk kunst” betyder i praksis, at jeg ofte optræder sammen med innovationsmiljøer og igangsættere – i et felt der går på tværs af ingeniør- og businesskultur på den ene side og kunst og kritisk teori på den anden. Det er et lille felt mellem disse verdener, og det betyder, at jeg ofte må finde mine alliancepartnere uden for teknologikunstens reservat: blandt forfattere, politiske tænkere, aktivister, forskere, der deler en interesse i, hvad teknologi gør ved samfund, uden nødvendigvis at dele et kunstnerisk sprog. Det er også en del af grunden til, at de traditioner, jeg trækker på, selv opererer mellem kunst, videnskab og samfundskritik snarere end inden for en enkelt disciplin.

Surrealismen insisterede på, at det uventede er en produktiv kraft i billedskabelsen – at billedet kan vise noget, der endnu ikke har et sprog. Det gælder ikke mindst surrealismens mekaniske og materielle praksisser: kollagen, assemblagen og frottagen, hvor eksisterende billeder og materialer rives ud af deres oprindelige sammenhæng og sammensættes til nye konfigurationer. Max Ernst klippede i illustrationer fra naturvidenskabelige tidsskrifter og varekataloger; Hannah Höch monterede fotografier fra massemedierne. Teknikken var ikke tilfældig. Den forudsatte et forråd af allerede eksisterende materiale – et arkiv, et datasæt om man vil – og den kunstneriske handling bestod i at udvælge, beskære og rekombinere fragmenter, så der opstod betydninger, som ingen af de enkelte dele bar i sig selv. Patafysikken, som Alfred Jarry formulerede den, erklærede sig som “videnskaben om imaginære løsninger” – en systematisk undersøgelse af undtagelser snarere end regler. Spekulativ fiktion udvider dette til narrative verdener, hvor alternative samfund og teknologier udforskes som tankeeksperimenter med materielle konsekvenser. Og networked art – fra tidlige net.art-praksisser til nutidens infrastrukturelle kunstformer – placerer disse spekulationer inden for konkrete teknologiske systemer, hvor spørgsmål om ejerskab, adgang og kontrol er uadskillelige fra det æstetiske. Det, de deler, er en orientering: virkeligheden er ikke givet, men kan forestilles anderledes.

Ingen af disse traditioner er opfundet fra ingenting. Surrealismens ordlege og betydningsforskydninger er del af en langt ældre tradition for sproglig og visuel eksperiment, der rækker ud over kunstverdens grænser – fra karnevallets inversioner og nonsens-litteraturen over folkelige gåder og ordspil til den retoriske traditions bevidste brug af tvetydighed. Spekulativ tænkning har rødder i filosofiske tankeeksperimenter, utopisk litteratur og religiøs forestillingsevne. Og netværksdannelse som kunstnerisk og social praksis går forud for internettet og rækker tilbage til brevvekslinger, saloner, undergrundsmagasiner og selvorganiserede fællesskaber. Disse er ikke traditioner, der opfindes én gang og overstås. De reaktualiseres og genopfindes løbende, og det er netop denne evne til at blive taget op igen under nye betingelser, der gør dem produktive som kunstneriske strategier.

Teori læser jeg i forlængelse af denne spekulative tradition: som tolkningsforslag der åbner forskellige handlerum, ikke som autoritativ ramme. Forskellige optikker forskyder blikket og synliggør det, der før undslap mig. Valget mellem dem er et spørgsmål om, hvad der er produktivt i en given situation, ikke om hvad der er sandt i absolut forstand. Denne tilgang er i sig selv patafysisk: den foretrækker den produktive undtagelse frem for den forpligtende regel. Den deles af en bred gruppe billedkunstnere, der arbejder på tværs af teoretiske traditioner uden at tilhøre nogen enkelt retning – feministisk teknologikritik i ét projekt, posthumanistisk filosofi i et andet, systemteori i et tredje. Det er pseudo-akademikerens gave: ikke at behøve at investere sig hundrede procent i en enkelt position, men at kunne bevæge sig mellem positioner og bruge dem der, hvor de gør noget ved arbejdet.

Konkret: teknologi optræder aldrig isoleret i mit arbejde. Det teknologiske er altid flettet ind i det økonomiske, det kulturelle og det personlige. Bruno Latours aktør-netværksteori kan give et sprog for denne sammenfletning, men rammen er for flad til at forstå, hvad der er på spil i arbejdet med AI-billedgenerering og lokal infrastruktur. Yuk Huis begreb om kosmoteknik tilbyder en anden optik. For Hui er teknologi aldrig universel; den er altid forankret i en bestemt kosmologisk og kulturel situation. Det resonerer med den patafysiske insisteren på det partikulære: ligesom patafysikken afviser generelle love til fordel for undtagelsens logik, afviser Hui en enhedslig teknologisk modernitet til fordel for en mangfoldighed af kosmotekniske traditioner. At køre AI-modeller lokalt på vedvarende energi er i denne optik en intervention i infrastrukturen selv – omend en begrænset og midlertidig, der ikke ophæver afhængigheden af de systemer, den forsøger at forskyde. Men jeg sigter heller ikke mod absolut renhed. Logikken er snarere skadesreduktion end forsagelse. Målet er at mindske afhængigheden af centraliserede, ekstraktive infrastrukturer skridt for skridt, uden illusionen om at nå et punkt, hvor praksis er fri for kompromis. Det er en bottom-up-bevægelse – små, lokale, iterative forskydninger af de betingelser, man arbejder under – som ikke er i modsætning til top-down-regulering og strukturel kritik, men supplerer den. De to bevægelser har brug for hinanden: Crawford og Pasquinellis analyser artikulerer, hvad der er på spil; den lokale praksis viser, at det er muligt at handle inden for de betingelser, analysen afdækker, uden at vente på, at betingelserne ændrer sig ovenfra. At kræve, at en lokal praksis først skal løse den globale udvindingskæde, før den kan legitimere sine egne forskydninger, er at kræve, at ingen handler, før alle betingelser er perfekte. Det er afmagt forklædt som etik. Insisteringen på det lokale er ikke en undvigelse af det globale, men en anerkendelse af, at det lokale er den eneste skala, hvor handling faktisk finder sted.

At vælge et andet teoretisk værktøj forrykker fokus og giver nye muligheder. Kate Crawford skriver, at AI-systemer er produkter af massive udvindingsprocesser – af data, arbejdskraft og naturressourcer. Matteo Pasquinelli forbinder maskinlæring til en lang tradition for industriel automatisering og argumenterer for, at abstraktion – den proces, hvorved en algoritme “lærer” at genkende mønstre – indebærer en politisk handling, hvor bestemte former for arbejde og viden gøres usynlige. Slægtskabet med den surrealistiske kollage er ikke blot på analoginiveau: ligesom Ernst og Höch arbejdede med et forråd af allerede cirkulerende billeder, arbejder en diffusionsmodel med milliarder af billeder indsamlet fra internettet. I begge tilfælde er det eksisterende materiale aldrig neutralt – det bærer de sammenhænge, det stammer fra, med ind i det nye billede. Forskellen er skala og usynlighed: den der skaber en kollage i hånden kan se, hvor billederne stammer fra, mens AI-modellens datasæt er så massivt, at ophav forsvinder i den statistiske proces. Tre forskellige blik – Hui, Crawford, Pasquinelli – der vægter forskellige og overlappende aspekter og åbner for forskellige handlinger. Surrealisternes automatisme-teknikker forsøgte at omgå bevidsthedens censur og lade materialet selv producere uventede forbindelser; udfordringen i mit billedkunstneriske arbejde er at forstå, hvad AI-systemernes datasæt muliggør og fortrænger – så jeg på lignende vis kan forme billeder, der ikke ligger under for min bevidsthed, men alligevel producerer produktive forbindelser.

Eksperimenterne følger en spekulativ snarere end deduktiv logik: “hvis jeg nu gør det her, hvad sker der så?” Den patafysiske metode bruger eksperimentet til at producere uforudsete situationer – hvad Jarry kaldte clinamen, den uventede afvigelse. Spekulativ fiktion opererer tilsvarende. Ursula K. Le Guin beskrev science fiction som et tankeeksperiment – ikke en forudsigelse, men en undersøgelse af, hvad der sker, når bestemte parametre i den kendte verden ændres. I mit arbejde fungerer AI-billedgenerering på en lignende måde. “Frihed, lighed og Hip-hop” tager udgangspunkt i specifikke steder og er realiseret som en serie af stedsspecifikke udstillinger i Hvidovre, Aalborg, Aarhus, Riga, Malmø, Krakow, Vancouver, Boston, Lexington og flere steder i København. Her kombineres de konkrete lokaliteter med historier og rygter, der er genkendelige for lokale: fragmenter fra arbejderbevægelsens historie, lokale konflikter, forsømte offentlige rum. Ind i dette flettes hip-hoppens protopolitiske potentiale som en bevægelse, der historisk har overtaget og omformet forsømte byrum – en praksis, der i sig selv er en form for bottom-up-intervention. AI-genererede billeder producerer spekulative kontrafaktiske scenarier, hvor disse historier krydser hinanden, og værkerne tager form af alt fra store printede tableauer i byrummet til immersive videoinstallationer. Statsministeren eller lokale kendisser optræder i halvgenkendelige billeder, mens skilte og baggrunde forskyder sig i videoen.

Køn skifter, rum transformeres, og identiteter forskydes. Ustabiliteten er strukturel: diffusionsmodellen opererer i et probabilistisk rum, hvor to billeder genereret ud fra den samme prompt aldrig er identiske. Der findes ikke én latent “korrekt” version af billedet – kun variationer med forskellig sandsynlighed. I videoform bliver dette synligt som fraværet af vedvarende identitet over tid. Modellen har ingen hukommelse om det, der tidligere har været i billedet; når en figur bevæger sig ud af rammen og vender tilbage, rekonstrueres den på ny ud fra generelle statistiske mønstre. Det er ikke glemsel, men fraværet af objektpermanens – hver frame er en lokal løsning på et visuelt problem, ikke et led i en kontinuerlig ontologi. Kunstnerisk er det netop dette fravær, der muliggør det taksonomiske sammenbrud: de kategorier, vi normalt bruger til at organisere verden – køn, alder, etnicitet, sted, tid – kollapser og genopstår i nye konfigurationer. Køn er én af de identitetsmarkører, der forskydes, men ikke den eneste; hele det system af genkendelse, vi navigerer efter, destabiliseres. Det er også en synliggørelse af, at AI’en “vælger” identitetsmarkører ud fra statistiske fordelinger, der afspejler bestemte magtforhold. Judy Wajcman skriver, at køn er indskrevet i teknologiens design, og her bliver det synligt som et konkret æstetisk fænomen: systemets normalfordelinger tager krop i billedet. I en tidligere version af algoritmen Stable Diffusion dukkede der en ranglet mand i træningstøj med en flaske vodka op, når man skrev “polsk mand” – en slags illustreret fordom, hvor datasættets statistiske mønstre kondenserede en hel befolkningsgruppe til et enkelt visuelt stereotyp. Men det taksonomiske sammenbrud muliggør også nye taksonomier – forbindelser og kategorier, der ikke eksisterede i det udgangsmateriale, systemet er trænet på, og som kan åbne for andre måder at forestille sig kroppe, rum og sociale relationer på.

Denne produktive ustabilitet opererer på flere niveauer: den iboende strukturelle variabilitet mellem genereringer, den temporale inkonsistens i video, den fremprovokerede ustabilitet, hvor prompt-design bevidst øger systemets tendens til afvigelse, og den kuratoriske udvælgelse, hvor bestemte output vælges netop fordi de fejler produktivt. Arbejdet finder sted i spændingen mellem alle fire.

I disse processer producerer det generative system jævnligt noget, der overskrider mine forudantagelser – Luciana Parisi har kaldt det algoritmers evne til at producere nye former for tænkning snarere end blot repræsentere en given verden. Som med den surrealistiske kollage er resultatet uforudsigeligt men ikke tilfældigt: det er altid betinget af det materiale, systemet har til rådighed. De “uventede” resultater er aldrig rene – de er altid medieret af datasættets sammensætning, og dermed af de magt- og repræsentationsforhold, der har bestemt, hvilke billeder der er indsamlet, og hvilke der er udeladt. En nøgtern teknisk analyse ville beskrive det samme som stokastisk variation inden for et statistisk rum, og den beskrivelse er ikke forkert. Men den lukker ned for bestemte spørgsmål – om hvad det forråd af billeder, modellen trækker på, egentlig indeholder og udelukker, og om hvad det betyder, at resultater, der opleves som overraskende, i virkeligheden er formet af datasættets blinde punkter. Den spekulative tolkning åbner for disse spørgsmål, og det er dens produktivitet. Ikke at den er mere sand end den tekniske, men at den gør det muligt at handle anderledes.

Konkret begynder min kunstneriske proces med research – antropologisk feltarbejde på de steder, hvor udstillingerne finder sted, og arkivarbejde i de historier, der knytter sig til dem. Ud af dette materiale formuleres en spekulativ tese: noget, der kunne være sket inden for projektets overordnede ramme. På baggrund af den tese skrives en prompt. Billedet bliver aldrig som idéen var. Idéen omskrives og tilpasses i nye prompts, frem og tilbage, indtil der opstår et billede, der fungerer – og som siger noget, der også overrasker mig selv. Det er i denne iterative bevægelse, at de fire niveauer af ustabilitet møder hinanden: det iboende i teknologien, det fremprovokerede i prompten, og det kuratoriske i den selektion, der afgør, hvornår et billede er færdigt. I videoformatet tilføjes det fjerde niveau, når enkeltbillederne sammensættes i tid og den temporale inkonsistens bliver synlig. “Færdigt” er aldrig et spørgsmål om overensstemmelse med den oprindelige idé, men om billedet har fundet noget, idéen ikke kunne forudse.

Projektet “Frihed, lighed & sundhed” bliver præsenteret på udstillingen “Forstadier” i Ringsted Galleriet og på Ringsted Hospital, hvor værkerne går i direkte dialog med hospitalets virkelighed. Udgangspunktet er hverdagslige billeder – medicinsk udstyr, hospitalsgange, uniformer – der bruges til at forestille sig, at velfærdsstaten kunne se anderledes ud. Projektet består af kropsstore, sammenrullede og sårbart sovende 3D-printede skulpturer samt håndskårne relieffer, der tager form efter AI-genererede skitser. I installationen indgår videoen “Leddyrsomsorg”, der forestiller et fremtidigt sundhedsvæsen, hvor kæmpemæssige blå bænkebidere – blå som medicinsk udstyr, blå som Ringsted Hospitals logo – har overtaget de roller, automatisering og AI ellers tildeles i sundhedspolitiske fremtidsvisioner. Kameraet bevæger sig i en lang, flydende bevægelse hen over dem, og der opstår en bevidst tvetydighed: de er fremmede nok til at forstyrre, men tilstrækkeligt materielt tilstedeværende til at stille den ubehagelige tanke, at dette kunne være et svar.

Men spekulationen har en pris. Patafysikken har en tendens til at blive hermetisk og selvreferentiel, og den tendens truer enhver praksis, der arbejder spekulativt. Det er en faldgrube, der er desto sværere at undgå, fordi den kan føles meningsfuld for den der spekulerer. Det spekulative kan blive et mål i sig selv, afkoblet fra den materielle og politiske virkelighed vi befinder os i. På samme måde har pseudo-akademikerens gave – friheden til at bevæge sig mellem positioner – en skyggeside: den kan blive alibi for aldrig at forpligte sig dybt nok til, at noget for alvor kan slå fejl eller blive falsificeret. Når alt er spekulativt, er intet rigtigt på spil. Det er ikke en advarsel jeg giver mig selv; det er en beskrivelse af noget, der faktisk hele tiden truer med at ske i mit eget arbejde. Projekter kollapser under deres egne ambitioner. Den teknologiske proces producerer resultater, der er æstetisk interessante men konceptuelt tomme. Den teoretiske eklekticisme glider uforvarende ind i en position, hvor enhver reference bekræfter det jeg allerede mener snarere end åbner nye rum for mig. Modtrækket er at insistere på, at spekulationerne forankres i konkret materiale – faktiske historiske situationer, specifikke teknologiske systemer, navngivne steder og institutioner – men det er et modtræk, der selv kræver løbende kritisk opmærksomhed og vedligeholdelse.

Udgangspunktet i min egen subjektivitet er et bevidst valg. Den subjektive tilgang handler om at tage ansvar for, hvordan min position former, hvad jeg ser og ikke ser i de systemer, jeg arbejder med – hvilke kropsidealer, hudfarver og kønsrepræsentationer modellerne reproducerer, og hvilke de udelukker. Udfordringen i at bevæge sig fra det subjektive til det fælles er reel og kan ikke løses programmatisk. Henk Borgdorff har formuleret problemet i akademiske termer – kunstnerisk forskning producerer viden, der er situeret og kontekstafhængig, og må gøre rede for sine egne grænser – og selv om hans formulering kan virke ret indlysende, er den grundlæggende pointe svær at komme uden om. Det fælles er ikke noget, der garanteres af intentionen om at skabe det. Det opstår – hvis det overhovedet opstår – i mødet mellem et specifikt værk og en specifik beskuer under specifikke betingelser, og det kan slå fejl. I networked art er dette særligt tydeligt, fordi værkerne eksisterer i distribuerede systemer, hvor “publikum” konstitueres gennem deltagelse, adgang og teknologisk infrastruktur. Men det gælder også for den udstillede installation og den trykte publikation: genkendelsen og fortolkningen er noget, der skal arbejdes frem, og den kræver, at værket er tilstrækkeligt præcist i sin form til at overleve mødet med en beskuer, der ikke kender kunstnerens intentioner, og åbne et rum for forpligtet reflektion.

I min praksis skal billederne gøre flere ting samtidig. De skal fungere formelt – kompositorisk, koloristisk, i deres interne logik. De skal danne et genkendeligt rum, hvor noget uplacerbart alligevel bliver acceptabelt: en situation, der ligner den kendte verden tilstrækkeligt til, at beskueren kan træde ind i den, men som forskyder den nok til at etablere et alternativ til den eksisterende samfundsorden. De skal være tilstrækkeligt uplacerbare og indeholde nok generative fejl – forvrængede hænder, ustabile perspektiver, ansigter der skifter karakter – til ikke at være fuldstændigt troværdige, uden at blive så abstrakte eller kaotiske, at de mister deres greb i beskueren. Det er en suspension of disbelief, der er designet til at kollapse under sig selv. Billedet inviterer beskueren ind i en verden, der kunne være virkelig, og afslører i samme bevægelse sin egen konstruerethed. Forhåbningen er, at dette kollaps giver plads til, at beskueren begynder at tænke selv – ikke blot om billedets indhold, men om de betingelser, der gør, at den eksisterende virkelighed fremstår som den eneste mulige.

Det er billedpolitisk metapolitik – en praksis, der forsøger at intervenere i de betingelser, billeder tænkes og cirkulerer under. Det er billeder, der argumenterer for en bestemt position: at lokal selvorganisering og selvbestemmelse er mulig. Den position trækker på David Graeber og den anarkistiske tradition, hvor politik ikke primært handler om at overtage statslige institutioner, men om at opbygge alternative strukturer nedefra. Billederne forsøger at gøre det muligt at tænke alternativer til det bestående ved at lave brud i den glatte billedverden – den strøm af polerede, friktionsløse billeder, der bekræfter tingenes tilstand. Funktionen er beslægtet med det samfundskritiske meme: en komprimeret, cirkulerbar intervention, der bruger genkendelige visuelle koder til at forskyde deres betydning. Men memet opererer i genkendelsens hastighed – det virker fordi det aflæses med det samme, og det forsvinder med det samme. Værket i et udstillingsrum kræver tid, og den tid gør det muligt for kollapset i suspension of disbelief at ske gradvist snarere end momentant. Beskueren kan opholde sig i tvetydigheden – i det rum, hvor billedet hverken er troværdigt eller utroværdigt – og det ophold er det sted, hvor alternativ tænkning kan begynde. Memet siger “se, det er absurd.” Værket siger “bliv her, og mærk at du ikke ved, om det er absurd.”

Jeg forsøger at behandle billede, tekst, lyd, tale og andre udtryksformer som komplementære snarere end rangordnede. W.J.T. Mitchell har argumenteret for, at alle medier er blandede medier, og at den rene adskillelse mellem tekst og billede er en ideologisk konstruktion. I praksis handler det om at skabe værker, hvor de forskellige modaliteter gensidigt destabiliserer hinanden – hvor billedet ikke illustrerer teksten, og teksten ikke forklarer billedet, men hvor begge åbner for noget, der ikke kunne formuleres i nogen af dem alene. Når modaliteterne hierarkiseres, reduceres værket til kommunikation af en allerede fastlagt betydning. Teksten bliver forklaringen, billedet bliver illustrationen, og den spekulative dimension, der er kernen i arbejdet, lukkes ned. Det er ikke en universel fordring – der findes en mangfoldighed af tekster med forskellige funktioner og modus, og denne tekst er selv en tekst, der nødvendigvis forklarer billeder, som læseren ikke kan se. Kravet gælder de tekster, der indgår i kunstproduktionen: udstillingsteksten, videoteksten, den tekst der ledsager billedet i rummet. I en given arbejdssituation kan det betyde, at et AI-genereret billede, der rummer en produktiv tvetydighed, flades ud i det øjeblik det ledsages af en tekst, der fortæller beskueren, hvad billedet “handler om”. Ernsts collageromaner – hvor billede og tekst aldrig forklarer hinanden men skaber en tredje, ustabil betydning i deres sammenstilling – og René Magrittes “Ceci n’est pas une pipe” etablerede denne destabilisering som strategi. I networked art udvides den til at omfatte kode, interface, infrastruktur og social interaktion som bærende elementer. Arbejdet strider dermed ofte mod normative formater for præsentation af forskning og kunst.

Lyden og talen hører til i dette felt som to forskellige kategorier, der kræver hver sin opmærksomhed. Lyden opererer som akustisk materiale og tekstur, der trænger ind i os uanset om vi vil det eller ej, mens talen – den syntetiske stemme, sangen, det talte ord – bærer på en specifik semantisk og autoritativ vægt, vi ofte har sværere ved at dekonstruere. Alligevel lever vi i en kultur, der primært forstår tekst som betydningsbærende, i mindre grad billeder og i endnu mindre grad lyd og tale. Lydlige udtryk bliver i stigende grad affektgjort – henvist til det følelsesmæssige, det stemningsskabende – og deres kritiske og konceptuelle muligheder overses. AI-genereret lyd og tale befinder sig i dette næsten usynlige repertoire. De bedømmes primært på, hvor tæt de ligner menneskelige kilder – hvor overbevisende imitationen er – frem for på, hvor meget de afviger og tilføjer til lydens syntaks og semantik. At insistere på lydens og talens konceptuelle og kritiske dimension – på, at AI-genererede auditive rum kan åbne nye erkendelser i stedet for at efterligne kendte – er en del af den samme billedpolitiske forpligtelse, der gælder for de visuelle og tekstlige modaliteter.

I praksis viser afvigelserne sig konkret. AI-genereret tale er dårlig til dansk: når teksterne bliver for lange, degenererer den til lyde, der på overfladen lyder lidt dansk eller måske bare skandinavisk, men ingen semantisk betydning har. Det er en sproglig uncanny valley, hvor genkendelsen af et sprog træder ind uden at betydningen følger med. Beskrivelser af lyde – et skridt, en dør der lukker – bliver til støj og glitch, der placeres der, hvor den realistiske lyd burde være: nogle gange umærkeligt overbevisende i videoens tempo, andre gange decideret underlige, så de gør opmærksom på lydens samplede, konstruerede natur. Det er den samme fejl, der begås, når AI-genererede billeder kun vurderes på fotorealisme: en kvalitetsskala, der tager det eksisterende som mål og dermed lukker ned for det generative systems potentiale for at producere erkendelse snarere end genkendelse.

Min forpligtelse er billedpolitisk og kunstnerisk skarphed: at hvert billede, hver tekst, hver lyd, hver tale og hver sammenstilling er så præcis som muligt i det, den gør. Det betyder, at billedet skal kunne bære sin egen vægt. At teksten skal supplere frem for overskrive billedets betydning og samtidig kunne stå som selvstændigt kunstnerisk materiale, ikke blot som kontekstualisering. At lyd og tale skal skabe friktion og ikke blot undermalning eller forklaring. At sammenstillingen af forskellige elementer og modaliteter skal producere en produktiv friktion – en modstand mellem delene, der inviterer beskueren til at skabe sin egen forbindelse frem for at modtage en færdig betydning – og ikke blot være additiv. Uden formel præcision bliver spekulationen uforpligtende; uden spekulation bliver præcisionen steril og projektet didaktisk. At udholde begge dele samtidig – uklarheden i det, der endnu ikke er forstået, og den formelle disciplin i det, der allerede er skabt – er det, praksis forsøger. De teoretiske referencer i denne tekst er selv en del af den bevægelse og vil blive erstattet af andre, når arbejdet kræver det.

Wed, 04 Feb 2026 18:10:15 +0100

Precursors opens feb. 28 at Ringsted Galleriet & Ringsted Sygehus

Leddyrsomsorg (Arthropod Care) landing page

Wed, 28 Jan 2026 21:33:05 +0100

My new landing page at oerum.org is an interactive text creature that crawls across the screen, comparing institutional objects to woodlouse anatomy while you place bureaucratic obstacles in its path. The work is part of Leddyrsomsorg, a project imagining a future Danish healthcare system where giant blue woodlice replace AI and automation. The crawling text draws parallels between the segmented bodies of isopods and the segmented experiences of navigating institutions: the venetian blinds in the waiting room, the server racks in the basement, the flex cord by the hospital bed. Each sentence proposes that the technologies surrounding care are already crustacean—jointed, plated, articulated. You can place stones in its path: such as JOURNAL, DIAGNOSE, HENVISNING, SAGSBEHANDLER. The creature avoids them. The stones fade. The text changes. This is not a game with a goal. It is a small model of how bodies move through systems that were not designed for them, adjusting course around obstacles that appear and dissolve according to logics beyond their control. The final sentence in the rotation states: In time all species will evolve into crustaceans. This references carcinisation, the tendency in evolution for non-crab crustaceans to independently develop crab-like forms. Perhaps institutions do the same. The interface uses vanilla JavaScript with no external libraries. Each letter is a separate DOM element positioned along a recorded path history, creating the trailing body effect. Legs animate using sine waves offset per segment. Obstacle avoidance uses simple vector-based steering. The cursor displays the next stone you will place. Click to drop it. Click a stone to remove it. The creature never leaves the screen. All processing runs client-side. Available in both Danish and English. oerum.org

Can you write with your hands?

Thu, 22 Jan 2026 19:08:45 +0100

My new landing page at www.oerum.org is an interactive Hand Letters interface that tracks your hand in real time to translate geometric gestures into a 29 character alphabet.

Intention

This is an experiment in constructing new relationships between bodies and machines. Rather than borrowing from existing sign languages, the project invents a gestural alphabet from scratch, mapping letters to spatial properties like finger count, spread angle, palm orientation, and position in frame.

The interface is deliberately clunky. Gestures fail to register, the camera misreads your hand, letters appear when you did not mean them. Imagine if this were your primary way of interfacing with digital technology. The friction is the point: it makes visible the labour and awkwardness we have learned to ignore in keyboards, touchscreens, and mice. Every interface is a strange negotiation between what bodies can do and what machines can perceive. This one just refuses to hide it.

The Technology

The interface is built on MediaPipe Hands, a machine learning pipeline developed by Google Research in 2020 for real time hand tracking. It runs directly in the browser using WebGL for GPU acceleration.

The system extracts 21 landmark coordinates per hand at approximately 30 frames per second.

Palm Detection Model: A BlazePalm detector locates the hand using a single shot anchor based architecture optimised for mobile inference.

Hand Landmark Model: A regression network predicts 21 3D keypoints (wrist, thumb, and four fingers with four joints each) from the cropped hand region.

Gesture Classification: Custom logic analyses derived features including finger extension states via y coordinate comparison, inter finger Euclidean distances, z depth differentials for palm orientation, and normalised frame position to match configurations against the invented alphabet.

The Danish letters Æ, Ø, and Å are included: two hands visible, circle with thumb raised, and fist held high.

Privacy

All processing runs client side. No images or landmark data leave your device.

Write with your hands: www.oerum.org

Sun, 11 Jan 2026 21:40:55 +0100

NOTES ON CONTINUING

Why do citizens not rise up? Why do the stateless not rise up? Why is there no mass refusal of surveillance and nationalism?

The silence is not accidental. Fear, division, and broken promises form the baseline condition. Solidarity does not spontaneously emerge from this; it cannot be demanded of those already exhausted by survival. If it is to exist, it must be constructed.

Why is critique so often directed toward those closest to us, who are equally constrained, rather than toward the structures that shape those constraints?

I observe this tendency and feel its pull. I try to resist it.

At the same time, I refuse the logic of total guilt-the idea that because I am enmeshed in these systems, I am disqualified from opposing them. This logic functions as paralysis disguised as accountability. I acknowledge my position without accepting that it renders me futile.

Conflict is displaced sideways. When power feels too abstract to confront, it becomes easier to police the behaviour of peers. This is reinforced by a political language that speaks endlessly of belonging while avoiding questions of ownership.

Disputes over who belongs are easier to sustain than disputes over who holds power.

This keeps the gaze horizontal.

Power has changed its form. Resources concentrate, while the mechanisms of that concentration remain distributed-networked, opaque, everywhere and nowhere.

We are left arguing over entitlement and recognition while extraction continues through interfaces designed to be frictionless.

This logic extends into culture.

A separation between aesthetics and politics has narrowed what is recognised as political action. The vote and the law are treated as the primary sites of agency. Other forms of world-making are dismissed as symbolic.

But reality is also shaped in the domain of perception-through the organisation of what is visible and what remains unseen.

To make images or sculptures is an action. Like any action, it has consequences. Overtly political art is no more or less political than art that claims neutrality.

Reactionary movements understand this. They do not need their images to be true; they need them to be adhesive. Memes and symbols are used to weaponise the desire for belonging, bypassing argument in favour of visceral response.

While others critique the concentration of wealth and power, these movements work to colonise the imagination.

The task requires both. It requires the solidity of the fact and the resonance of the myth. One without the other is either a lecture no one hears, or a story that demands belief.

To claim neutrality in this context is not to step outside the game. It is to leave the field uncontested.

This raises a tension I cannot resolve alone.

How does one speak of plurality without demanding uniformity? A multitude cannot exist if everyone is required to dream of the same life.

But plurality does not mean the absence of boundaries. The task is to distinguish between the limits I choose to defend and those I have inherited without reflection.

It is easy to associate power only with domination. This has become the dominant discourse. As a result, I have often mistaken powerlessness for moral safety. In trying to avoid becoming oppressive, I have avoided becoming capable.

Yet there is power in refusal. Power in creation. Power in care.

None of these are pure. To act is to close off other possibilities.

What must be refused is the belief that weakness is a virtue-or a strength.

To imagine other worlds requires openness to theory alongside ethical commitment. It requires holding uncertainty without succumbing to two familiar forms of paralysis:

The grief that immobilises. And the detachment that masquerades as realism.

Acknowledging the severity of the situation is not a reason to withdraw. It is a reason to continue.

I make attempts where I can. To maintain attention. To refuse the immediate reaction. To make things that hold space for complexity.

I try not to wait for permission, or for the promise that these efforts will be enough.

I live with a contradiction I cannot solve: the desire to dismantle what harms us, and the suspicion that I might not live to see it dismantled.
I act without imagining I am saving anything. I continue without expecting a breakthrough.

I do not know if there is a we. I write these notes to see if one might appear.

There is no finale. Just the daily attempt not to go numb. A provisional sanity. And the tentative effort to simply keep going.

#stuffiwonderabout #tingjegspørgermigselvom

On pessimism

Thu, 08 Jan 2026 17:22:11 +0100

Believing in the liberal utopia promised by post-war politicians is a form of cruel optimism; treating it as a guaranteed destination brings only disappointment and despair.

However, that the situation appears hopeless should not prevent us from doing our best. Pessimism is not the opposite of action or solidarity.

Instead, the pessimist wields utopia as a strategy for change and imagination, not as an end in itself. We use the image of a better world not because we expect to arrive there, but as a tool to expose the inadequacy of the present and to keep our capacity for difference alive.

In this pursuit, we find a hope without hope. We require no paragons of virtue, no heroes of the revolution, and no demonstration of utility or worthiness. And even if there is no “we” that might act in solidarity with, we can still act—contingently, tenderly, locally, and temporarily—without needing to become legible or useful. Even the most isolated and lonely dreamer still dreams.

We act simply because the imagination of a different world compels us to care for this one.t

#stuffiwonderabout #tingjegspørgermigselvom

Leddyrsomsorg (Arthropod Care)

Tue, 06 Jan 2026 16:39:54 +0100

Leddyrsomsorg is a video piece using WAN 2.2 that imagines a future Danish healthcare system where giant blue woodlice and other arthropods have replaced AI and automation. The work will be shown at Ringsted Galleri in February 2026, with elements installed at Ringsted Sygehus. This split location is deliberate: the hospital setting places speculative images of care within the institutional architecture where care is actually administered, while the gallery provides a context for the work’s more discursive claims. The work presents a welfare state utopia, a deliberately implausible scenario that sidesteps familiar debates about technology and care. It repurposes elements of “biophilic design,” where nature is organised to support recovery. But here, the organisms we rarely extend sympathy to have taken the place of therapy dogs or verdant parks. The woodlouse (Oniscus asellus) is taxonomically distinct from the insects usually associated with infestation. Belonging to the order Isopoda within the class Malacostraca, they are terrestrial crustaceans–closer kin to lobsters than to the houseflies or wasps that typically trigger revulsion in local domestic contexts. This biological nuance matters: we tend to normalise AI while immediately reading these crustaceans as alien. The work juxtaposes the high-trust, sterile aesthetic of Danish design–typically characterised by light woods and functional minimalism–with the chitinous, prehistoric movements of Isopoda. Both AI systems and these ancient crustaceans operate on logics that remain inhuman despite our attempts to domesticate them. WAN 2.2 is a video generation model developed by Wand AI, a Chinese startup founded in 2024 by former ByteDance researchers. The model utilises a Diffusion Transformer (DiT) architecture, an approach that combines diffusion processes with transformer networks designed for temporal coherence. The physical infrastructure underpinning this model is as significant as its software. Wand AI reportedly trained the model using thousands of NVIDIA H100 GPUs. Given strict US export bans on these chips, this represents a logistical feat involving the “grey market.” While the list price of an H100 is roughly $25,000 USD, reports from early 2025 indicate that prices within China fluctuate between $40,000 and $90,000 USD per unit. The volatility tracks sanction enforcement and supply-chain precarity. In that sense, every frame hints at infrastructure under pressure. China’s AI development occurs within a distinct strategic framework, aiming for global leadership by 2030. However, for artists outside China, using a Chinese model involves navigating a specific hegemony defined by ideological boundaries. These models are subject to strict regulatory oversight, specifically the “Provisions on the Management of Algorithmic Recommendations” (2022) and the “Measures for the Management of Generative AI Services” (2023). These regulations mandate that generative AI must not subvert state power, advocate the overthrow of the socialist system, or incite ethnic hatred. This creates censorship patterns distinct from Western commercial platforms. While US models filter content based on “brand safety” and legal liability, Chinese models filter for state-approved narratives. When prompting for complex social scenarios, one may find the model refuses to generate imagery suggesting civil unrest or specific political symbolism, not because of safety alignment, but due to Beijing’s stability mandates. The concentration of AI development in the hands of a few giants creates an “AI Desert,” where universal models perform poorly on anything outside the dominant cultural hegemony. In some analyses, images from the US and Western Europe appear overrepresented in major training datasets like LAION-5B by up to a factor of 10 relative to their population. In several widely used facial datasets, white subjects comprise around 60–70%, while Black and Hispanic subjects often fall into the single digits. The woodlouse, with its segmented body and multiple legs, is not well represented in these datasets either. It does not fit the templates. Linguistic bias is even more pronounced. The Common Crawl corpus, which underpins many foundation models, is approximately 45% English. Danish constitutes less than 0.1% of the total web corpus, and for smaller minority languages, representation drops below 0.01%, leaving them statistically marginal. A model trained on this data will struggle to render the specific spectral quality of the “blue hour” associated with the Skagen painters, or the precise cultural context of a local welfare centre, substituting them with generic, statistical averages derived from American or Chinese data. Most local artists will never consciously work with AI models. But their work will almost certainly pass through them: compressed, sorted, and subtly altered by systems baked into smartphone cameras, photo-editing software, and the content delivery networks through which nearly all images now travel. The question is not whether to engage with these systems but whether to do so knowingly. For those who choose to work with AI deliberately, the current situation demands a tactical manoeuvre: playing one hegemon against the other. Using a Chinese model like WAN 2.2 becomes a way of jamming the signal of American cultural dominance. If US models like Sora function as the default standard–seamless, brand-safe, and template-like–then the Chinese model, with its distinct artifacts and ideological blind spots, offers a productive displacement. Paradoxically, Chinese models often seem to render Danish landscapes more convincingly than their American counterparts. This is not because Wand AI trained on Vilhelm Hammershøi or the Skagen painters. The reason may be structural: northern China perhaps shares with Denmark a quality of flat, diffuse light, muted seasonal colour, and architectural scale that California simply does not possess. The brick and render of local residential buildings, the particular density of deciduous vegetation, the low horizons–these might find closer analogues in Heilongjiang or Shandong than in Los Angeles or Arizona. The American models, trained predominantly on data from a country where “good weather” means sunshine, tend to oversaturate and clarify excessively. They impose a Californian luminosity and default to timber-frame construction foreign to the local context. The Chinese models, perhaps inadvertently, may have absorbed a tonal range and built environment closer to the Baltic. The grey-green of a Danish beech forest in April, the particular flattening of depth on an overcast afternoon, the modest scale of welfare-state housing–these seem to emerge more readily from a model trained partly on images from northern China than from one trained on the American sunbelt. Both systems aspire to universalism. The difference is one of familiarity. For someone raised within the American cultural sphere–and this includes most Danes under sixty–Hollywood’s visual grammar now feels natural because it is everywhere. We do not notice when a model defaults to three-point lighting or golden-hour warmth because these conventions have structured our expectations of what images should look like. Chinese visual defaults, by contrast, remain legible as defaults: the China Central Television aesthetic, the particular palette of state-produced historical dramas, the compositional habits of Weibo image culture. The Chinese model is no less hegemonic–it is simply a hegemony we can still see. This is not to romanticise Chinese AI as a space of freedom. The constraints are real and different. When generating scenes of collective care, certain configurations of bodies trigger refusals; gatherings that might read as protest or unrest simply fail to render. But these constraints produce their own visual culture. Chinese internet platforms have long generated a rich tradition of mutating memes that circumvent censorship through visual substitution: Winnie the Pooh standing in for Xi Jinping, or the “Grass Mud Horse” (草泥马) whose name puns on a Mandarin obscenity. More recently, the character of Piglet has proliferated as a vessel for critique. His innocuous form carries meanings that evade algorithmic detection. These images thrive precisely because of the censorship apparatus, not despite it. Working within a Chinese model means inheriting something of this oblique visual logic, where meaning migrates into unexpected forms. The woodlice in Leddyrsomsorg function similarly: their innocuous, even repellent forms carry meanings the system was not trained to anticipate. For a local artist, this obliqueness might resonate with certain habits of indirect speech. Denmark’s twentieth-century history includes moments where images and symbols carried meanings that could not be stated directly: the occupation-era practice of wearing red, white, and blue King’s Badges as silent resistance, or the tradition of singing national songs as collective defiance. More recently, the Danish cartoon crisis demonstrated how images become sites of geopolitical friction, their meanings multiplying beyond any author’s intention. Whether or not there is a coherent local tradition of coded communication, working with Chinese AI–with its own regime of prohibited and permitted images–places the artist in a structurally similar position: navigating constraint through indirection, producing meaning in the gaps. The strategic value of this detour is temporary. It depends on the continued asymmetry between visual conventions that feel natural because they are everywhere and those that still register as foreign. As Chinese visual culture becomes more globally familiar–through TikTok, through the international circulation of Chinese cinema, through the sheer volume of AI-generated content flowing from these models–this window will close. The goal is not to remain permanently in orbit around Beijing any more than around San Francisco. It is to use the friction between these two gravitational fields to accelerate toward something else: local models trained on local archives, running on local infrastructure, producing images that do not need to be legible to either empire. Ultimately, this detour points toward a future of distributed capacity. If local practitioners–historians, community archivists, artists–could fine-tune smaller, open-source models on highly specific datasets, the outputs would shift from generic approximations to culturally situated artifacts. A Danish cultural institution could train a model specifically on the Royal Danish Library’s photo archives, ensuring that historical dress, architectural vernacular, and local idioms are preserved rather than smoothed into global tropes. What the detour through Chinese AI teaches, above all, is how dependence is produced at the infrastructural level. Running models locally forces smaller architectures and lower fidelity–consumer hardware with limited VRAM cannot support the trillion-parameter scale of the hegemonic models. But this constraint is also the condition of autonomy. Ivan Illich distinguished between tools that extend human capacity and those that create dependence on industrial systems and professional gatekeepers. A model requiring thousands of GPUs, procured through grey markets and cooled by data centres drawing megawatts, cannot be a convivial tool; it remains a service to which one submits. The local model, running on hardware one actually owns, recovers something Illich considered essential: the capacity to shape one’s means of production rather than consuming outputs defined elsewhere. The degraded image is the price of self-determination. In Leddyrsomsorg, WAN 2.2 produces its own instabilities. Woodlice begin as woodlice but drift into insects; faces rearrange themselves when backs are turned; rooms reorganise as the camera pans. The model cannot hold its categories stable. What begins as a crustacean becomes an arthropod becomes something else, taxonomies dissolving in real time. This is not a failure to be corrected but a condition to be inhabited. The fluidity of signifiers–bodies, species, architectures shifting while remaining loosely recognisable–produces a dreamlike space where the boundaries that structure our thinking about care, nature, and technology become similarly unstable. The model also produces bodies that depart from the norms of those who trained it: figures lacking arms, feet turned backwards, proportions that would be flagged as errors in any commercial context. But human bodies are wild and unruly. Our genetic mass produces extraordinary variation–variation that has been systematically excluded from the commercial photography these models learn to emulate. The training data encodes not human diversity but the narrow aesthetic of stock libraries and advertising campaigns. When the model “fails” to reproduce this narrowness, it inadvertently gestures toward the bodies that were never photographed, or never photographed approvingly. The so-called errors may sit closer to aspects of human variation than the polished outputs the model was trained to produce. The woodlice do not represent an alternative to AI; they emerge from the same generative instability, their alien forms vibrating with the noise of a system that cannot decide what it is looking at, and perhaps should not be forced to decide. We will have to live with AI systems as we live with woodlice in our basements: not as a choice but as a condition. The question is not how to avoid or eliminate them. Woodlice have been decomposing organic matter for three hundred million years; they will outlast our concerns about them. AI is now woven into the infrastructure through which images, text, and meaning circulate; it will not be uninvented. The question is how to inhabit these systems without letting them cause too much harm, and without causing too much harm through them. This is not a triumphant position. It is closer to the everyday pragmatics of damp management or repetitive strain: an ongoing negotiation with conditions that cannot be eliminated, only managed, mitigated, and sometimes resisted. Nam June Paik once said he used technology in order to hate it more properly. The formulation is useful because it refuses the fantasy of critique from a clean outside. To hate something properly requires knowing its textures, its tolerances, the places where it gives. This text was proofread and spell-checked with the assistance of a large language model. The video it describes was generated by another. The critique of hegemonic AI systems is produced through hegemonic AI systems. This is not a contradiction to be resolved but a condition to be acknowledged. Implication is the starting point, not the failure. In Leddyrsomsorg, the woodlice are the form this implication takes: creatures that thrive in the damp, doing necessary work in spaces we would rather not look at. Working tactically within hegemonic systems is how we learn to imagine building something else. The Danish welfare state itself emerged not from a sudden utopian rupture but from decades of compromise, negotiation, and the slow accumulation of small gains. If there is a future of local AI–models trained on local archives, running on local power, answerable to local needs–it will be built the same way: not by rejecting current systems outright, but by learning their textures and bias well enough to know where they give.

#FirhedLighedOgSymptom #WelfarestateMyths #SurealSocialRealism #ringstedsygehus #ringsted Støttet at Statens Kunstfond

Leddyrsomsorg (Arthropod Care)

Tue, 06 Jan 2026 16:37:55 +0100

#FirhedLighedOgSymptom #WelfarestateMyths #SurealSocialRealism #ringstedsygehus #ringsted Støttet at Statens Kunstfond

Tue, 30 Dec 2025 16:35:57 +0100

Prognose eller Kaos (Prognosis or chaos) hand carved xps foam relief (220 x 60 cm) for my half of a duo show with @askweee at @ringstedgalleriet opening at the end of February 2026#FirhedLighedOgSymptom #WelfarestateMyths #SurealSocialRealism #ringstedsygehus #ringsted Støttet at Statens Kunstfond

New landing page

Mon, 29 Dec 2025 14:36:07 +0100

Is your expression a commodity? My new portfolio landing page is live at www.oerum.org. It is an interactive “Pattern Recognition Interface” that scans your face in real-time to classify your emotional state. Intention: We often anthropomorphize AI, believing it “sees” or “understands” us. This project strips that illusion away. It presents the algorithm for what it is: a statistical machine measuring surface geometry. The project questions the reduction of complex human affect into rigid taxonomies and highlights the friction between data (the map) and feeling (the territory). The Technology: The interface is built on face-api.js, an open-source library created by Vincent Mühler in 2018 to democratize facial recognition. It runs on top of TensorFlow.js, a machine learning engine developed by the Google Brain team that utilizes the user’s GPU directly in the browser. The system chains three specific neural networks to function: SSD MobileNet V1: A “Single Shot Detector” originally designed for mobile devices, used here to locate the bounding box of the face. FaceLandmark68Net: A model trained on labeled datasets to map 68 specific geometric points (jawline, eyes, nose) onto the face. FaceExpressionNet: A classifier using Depthwise Separable Convolutions to calculate the statistical probability that these geometric coordinates match a labeled emotion (e.g., “Happy” or “Sad”). Privacy: Because this runs on client-side TensorFlow, the surveillance is contained entirely within your own device. No biometric data is sent to the cloud. Experience the loop: www.oerum.org

Diagnose gør stærk

Fri, 26 Dec 2025 20:42:18 +0100

Diagnose gør stærk (diagnosis makes strong) hand carved xps foam relief (120 x 60 cm) for my half of a duo show with @askweee at @ringstedgalleriet opening at the end of February 2026#FirhedLighedOgSymptom #WelfarestateMyths #SurealSocialRealism #ringstedsygehus #ringsted Støttet at Statens Kunstfond

Mon, 22 Dec 2025 15:19:53 +0100

Study #3 - Christmas in the chemo therapy ward for Frihed, Lighed og Symptom (Freedom, equality and symptom) - my half of a duo show with @askweee at @ringstedgalleriet opening at the end of February 2026#FirhedLighedOgSymptom #WelfarestateMyths #WAN22

Tak for 2025

Sun, 21 Dec 2025 17:35:53 +0100

Tak tak tak for opmærksomheden. Ordet tak, har jeg ladet mig fortælle, stammer fra takstræets giftige blade, eller var det takstregulering? Yderst giftigt for mennesker og især for husdyr som heste og hunde – eller regulering af fjernvarmeudgifter. Eller kommer tak egentlig fra takt – den rytme man finder, når man skylder andre mere end man kan betale tilbage? Tak for al den tid, jeg har haft i år til at lave kunst og arbejde sammen med så mange fede mennesker. Og tak for, at min dreng er kommet ind på Børnepsykiatrisk. Tak for, at jeg siden sommerferien har kunnet være hjemme med ham, også selvom det har ændret rytmen i mit arbejde og min tilstedeværelse. Tal for at trods denne pause i kunstproduktionen var 2025 fyldt med interventioner, udstillinger og forskning. Tak til udstillingsstederne Tak til Hvidovre Hovedbibliotek for at huse Hvidovre gør gode tider bedre (jan–feb) og lade mig genskrive lokal forstadshistorie gennem AI-genererede billeder. Tak til KH7 Artspace i Aarhus for at invitere mig ind i Where the Walls Weep Sugar (mar). Tak til Skene i Malmø og kurator Kevin Malcolm for pladsen i At the Edge II (mar–apr) sammen med Jamila Drott, Maxime Hourani og Maia Torp Neergaard. Tak til Boston Cyberarts, Or Gallery i Vancouver og The Living Arts and Science Center i Lexington for at tage imod Diffused States (apr–jul) på den nordamerikanske turné. Tak til Bunkier Sztuki i Kraków og kurator Kristian Handberg for at vise Monuments of a Fictional Past (maj–aug) under Three Seas Art Festival. Tak til Rundetårn for at inkludere mit bidrag i The Good, the Lost, and the Beautiful (jun–aug) som del af udstillingen De Tabte Runesten. Tak til Kunsthal Aarhus for rammerne om Aarhus’er #1 (jun–nov). Tak til Emilio Hestepis for samarbejdet om dette kapitel i Frihed, lighed og hiphop, inklusiv den legale graffiti-væg og byttebutikken – og tak til Anders Reventlov og co. for at male den graffiti, AI ikke kunne forestille sig. Tak til internettet for at agere galleri for None of These Images Are of Me (aug) – mine AI-genererede selvportrætter. Tak til Sophienholm Kunsthal for lyset i mørket med Nyt Lys 25 (nov). Tak til Captive Portal og kurateringen Tak til Andrian og Emil for at kuratere Kiosque de l’In-visible (maj–sep), og tak til det offentlige rum for at lægge græs til. Tak til Kassandra Wellendorf og Kristin Veel for at udforske overvågning og hjemmet i HomeCTRL (sep). Tak til Emil Torp-Rasmussen, Selma Harboe & Filippa Maria Søndergaard Sørensen for at kuratere xÆTER (dec), og tak til mørket for at lade video og lyd træde frem. Tak til forskningen Tak til HAIC-III og Københavns Universitet for mit ph.d.-stipendium og muligheden for at forske i “Human-AI Collaboration” fra min 50-års fødselsdag. Tak til Aarhus Universitet for taletid ved HAIC-III åbningsseminaret om AI & Identity (mar). Tak til publikum ved Prompt me up (feb) for diskussionen om kontrol og kreativitet. Tak til de lyttende ører ved min Friday Lecture på Aarhus Universitet (jul) om “Elektronisk længsel og mulig fejlanvendelse”. Tak til The Performance Bulletin på Den Frie og Or Gallery for de gode artist talks. Tak for ordene Tak til læserne af mine blog-essays om institutionskritik, sensibilitetsfælden og centrummets provinsialisme. Tak til Mikrofest og Atlas Mag for henholdsvis distribution og anmeldelse af Jeg er en mislykket kunstner. Tak for alt det, der forblev ugjort, fordi jeg skrev tekster på min telefon som værn mod verdens tilfældigheder. Tak til AI for stavekontrol, kommatering, irriterende omskrivninger af mine tekster jeg ikke bad om der tvang mig til at skrive det hele om igen. Tak for rammerne og rummeligheden hvor den var Tak til KUA for at jeg har kunnet sygemelde mig – og tak til min vejleder Kristin Veel, Søren Pold og Malthe Stavning Erslev. Tak til BKF Mentor-ordningen – og tak for, at ingen meldte sig til at bruge mig som mentor. Tak til ældre kollegaer, der føler et slægtskab, og yngre, der ikke forfalder til generationstænkning. Tak til Statens Kunstfond for arbejdsroen og kollegaskabet. Tak til alle der fyldte vores lejlighed da jeg blev 50. Tak til de anonyme, der bidrager til open source-software og online forummer. Dem, hvis idéer jeg har lånt uden at vide det. Dem, der har lånt mine idéer. Dem, der deler deres viden frit. Og dem, der giver en hånd, når der er brug for det. Tak til dem, jeg fik lov til at hjælpe, og dem jeg ikke kender endnu, men som har lidt de samme idéer. Dem, der hjælper, når det kniber med kræfter og tid. Og dem, der ikke hjælper, fordi de har nok at se til selv. Tak til dem, som ikke tager sig selv for højtideligt. Dem, der ser, at humor og kritik kan være to sider af samme sag. Dem, der er utilfredse med verden, og dem, der gør det så godt de nu kan, med det de har. Tak til dem, der ikke er helte. Tak til dem, der arbejder kunst-politisk, og dem der gerne ville. Dem, der ser, at kunst-politik er en del af en større politik, og dem, der laver kunst-politisk eller ej uden at vide det. Til dem, hvis tanker irriterer mig nok til selv at skrive, og dem der skriver, så jeg forstår noget, jeg ikke selv kan formulere. Dem der elsker lister, og dem uden mådehold. Tak for alle de idéer, der plager mig, og gør, at jeg altid har travlt. Tak til de fonde og institutioner, jeg forholder mig kritisk til, og som stadig støtter mig – fordi de ved, at kritik kommer af høje håb til dem. TAK Tak til Tania Ørum. Katrine Malinovsky. Mathias Borello. Hannah Mathiesen Keegan. Michael Bolt Fisher. Brian Sørensen. Peter Ole Pedersen. Anne Riis. Simone Juel Jantzen. Camilla Birgitte Munch. Siri Christine Wahlberg Feil. Vigga Bang-Larsen. Molli Balling-Hauge. Julie Rose Rahbek. Frida Nora Hornbæk Eriksen. Simon Hardis. Lisa Strømbeck. Lai Yi Ohlsen. Lani Asunción. Jazsalyn. Caroline Sinders. Roopa Vasudevan. hannah holtzclaw. Will Owen. Mathilde Duus. Frida Retz. CC Brogaard. Geobit. Louis Andre Jørgensen. Ida Kvetny. Sidsel Bonde. Luxusmusklen. Louise Vind Nielsen. Jeppe Krogsgaard. Tak til Den Frie Udstillingsbygning. Roskilde Bibliotek. Billedkunstnernes Forbund. Kunstnersammenslutningen Jylland. Grønningen. Tak til Obel Family Fund. Ny Carlsbergfondet. Augustinus Fonden. C.A.C Fonden. Knud Højgaards Fond. Lemvigh-Müller Fonden. Spar Nord Fonden. Det Obelske Familiefond. Salling Fondene. 15. Juni Fonden. A.P. Møller Fonden. Lizzie & Mogens Staal Fonden. Beckett-Fonden. Axel Muusfeldts Fond. Toyota-Fonden. Kulturrådet. Malmö stad. Region Skåne. Københavns Kommune. Aarhus Kommune. Tak til Night School for Data Fluencies. DATA/FFECT. Data Fluencies Theatre Project. Data Fluencies Pedagogies. Emerson College. York University. VIA University College. Goldsmiths College. Det Kongelige Danske Kunstakademi. Fynske Kunstakademi. Uncertain Archives. Tak til Salling. Batch Productions. Ice Screen Printing. Café Kunsthal. Hetzner. PicoCMS. Tak til serveren i kælderen. Vindmøllerne der driver den. De genbrugte GPU’er. Flux.dev. Stable Diffusion. SDXL. LoRA-modellerne. ComfyUI. Den langsomme internetforbindelse. Min gamle ThinkPad. USB-kablet der nogle gange virker. 3D-printeren der altid skal kalibreres. XPS-skummet. Jesmoniten. Spartlen. Malingen. Tak til kaffen. Den lokale Netto. Cyklerne når de ikke er flade. DSB undtagen når de ikke kører. Tak til alle der trykkede like. Alle der ikke trykkede like men læste alligevel. Alle som scrollede forbi men følte noget. Følgerne på Instagram. Følgerne på Mastodon. De der stadig bruger Facebook. De der sendte en mail. De der ikke sendte en mail men tænkte på det. Tak til alle dem der har tilbudt hjælp og solidaritet, men som jeg ikke har magtet at tage imod. Tak til gamle venner jeg ikke har set men gerne ville. Tak for alle de gode udstillinger jeg har set, og dem jeg gerne ville have set men ikke nåede. Tak til mine kollegaer i Statens Kunstfond. KIOF. Alle ansøgere. Også dem vi ikke kunne støtte. Tak til Aalborg Stadsarkiv. Art Hub Copenhagen. Radar Contemporary. Meter. Artsy. e-flux. Art Matter. Kulturkupeen. Kunstkritikk. Tak til Fredagslekturen. Alle der mødte op. Alle der ikke mødte op men så optagelsen. Tak til familien. Tålmodigheden. Hospitalspersonalet. Lægerne. Sygeplejerskerne. Sosu’erne. Vuggestuen. Børnehaven. Skolen. Lærerne. Børnepsykiatrisk afdeling. Tak til Københavns Kommune for at gøre mit liv en smule mere socialrealistisk. Tak til overboen der ikke klagede over serverstøjen. Pakkemanden der får en kop kaffe en gang imellem. Skraldemanden. El-installatøren. VVS’eren. Tak til dem der brokker sig og dem der bare tager det. Tak til de anonyme graffiti crews. De kollektive signaturer. De roterende medlemmer. De der deler uden at eje. De der bygger uden at sælge. Tak til graffitien på togene. Graffitien på væggene. Den lovlige graffitivæg. Den ulovlige graffiti jeg aldrig har lavet og intet ved om. Tak til bænkebidere, krebsdyr og invasive arter uden dansk pas.Tak til alle de dyr, vi kalder skadedyr, fordi de trives i vores menneskeskabte verden. De planter, vi kalder ukrudt, og den natur, vi kalder unaturlig. Tak til Thorkild Simonsen (kontrafaktisk). Jakobine Fridtjof (fiktiv). Marc Johnston (spekulativ). DJ Dynamic (imaginær). Nalla (hypotetisk). Kong Sommer (alternativ). Tak til alle de kontrafaktiske borgmestre. Alle de fiktive rappere og hjemmelavede mixtapes. Alle de spekulative og kontrære arkitekter. Alle de imaginære kollektiver og samfund. Alle de alternative og uskrevne historier. Tak til fejlene i algoritmerne. Glitchene i outputtet. Hallucinationerne i modellerne. Bias i datasættene. Det amerikanske og kinesiske træningsdata der ikke ved hvad dansk provinsby er. Tak for ting og sager jeg ikke kan sætte min finger på. Tak til dem der læste hele denne liste. Dem der skimmede. Dem der stoppede her. Tak til de mange som jeg også burde have nævnt. #stuffiwonderabout #tingjegspørgermigselvom

Min anden karriere

Sat, 20 Dec 2025 16:58:36 +0100

I Jeg har aldrig selv kunnet lide at gå i skole og har aldrig været nem at undervise. Min mor underviste på universitetet, og jeg tænkte, at det var det sidste, jeg selv skulle. Alligevel begyndte jeg at undervise, mens jeg stadigvæk selv gik på Kunstakademiets grundskole. Det var videoeffekter hver fredag på teknisk skole, hvor jeg selv havde gået før. Med tømmermænd fra ferniseringer, uoplagte jævnaldrende og tutorials fra Creative Cow. Et kursus jeg arvede fra min daværende kæreste. Ikke noget snak om indhold eller personligt udtryk, bare tekniske færdigheder, men selvfølgelig slap der lidt underligheder igennem fra min egen praksis. Så en dag ringede en ældre elev fra Akademiet til mig og spurgte, om jeg ville overtage hans Photoshop-undervisning på en højskole. Igen ikke noget kunstnerisk, bare teknik. Og jeg begyndte at komme på skolen en eller to gange om året, mens jeg langsomt arbejdede mig væk fra kun at arbejde med teknik og hen mod også at få lov at snakke lidt om indhold. Jeg holdt morgenforedrag og sang meget ukomfortabelt for i koret. II Til at begynde med var eleverne en blanding af socialt udsatte og unge mennesker med kunstneriske ambitioner. De fleste vidste kun lidt om samtidskunst og var stadig i gang med at finde ud af, om de måske skulle være kunstnere. Undervisningen blev nødt til at rumme både mange forskellige måder at lave kunst på og mange forestillinger om kunstverdenen og kunst i det hele taget. Jeg blev ved med at undervise på højskolen on and off i mange år, mens tingene langsomt ændrede sig. Selvfølgelig var der altid undtagelser – de målrettede blandt de vilde, og de krøllede hjerner blandt stræberne – men tendensen var tydelig. Fra at være blandede hold med meget forskellige ambitioner blev de, der kom på skolen, mere og mere vidende om og sikre på, at de skulle på Kunstakademiet. Det var dejligt. Eleverne var nemmere at undervise og motivere og tit rigtigt dygtige allerede. Formatet blev to ugers intensive forløb med en slags afsluttende udstillinger. Jeg var der alligevel 24 timer i døgnet og stillede mig til rådighed hele den tid, jeg var der, selvom jeg kun fik betalt for ganske få timer. Det var sjovt, vildt og totalt opslidende på lige den måde, jeg godt kan lide. Eleverne begyndte i stigende grad at søge akademier i Norden og udlandet. Jeg blev færdig med Kunstakademiet, højskolens ledelse skiftede, og jeg blev ved med at komme tilbage. Jeg fik aldrig nogen pædagogisk træning ud over, hvad jeg kunne samle op fra bøger om Black Mountain College, fra ældre kolleger, eller havde fået uforvarende med hjemmefra. Indimellem underviste jeg også andre steder og i andre sammenhænge og begyndte at føle mig lidt mere komfortabel som underviser. Men eleverne begyndte at ændre sig. Eller rettere: Tidsånden omkring dem gjorde. Før havde de generelt været åbne over for eksperimenter og for at lave fede ting i starten af året, og først senere overveje om de skulle på Akademiet. Nu blev spørgsmålet i stigende grad fra starten, hvordan man kom ind på en af de mytologiske kunstskoler. Der var stadig masser af nysgerrige og søgende sjæle imellem, der ville kunsten for kunstens skyld, men de var mest optaget af at producere, hvad de troede kunne skaffe dem ind. Skolen var i stigende grad blevet det sted, man tog hen, når man vidste, at man ville gå på kunstskole og skulle have hjælp til at komme ind. Fuldt forståeligt i den tidsånd af professionalisering i kunstverdenen og den viden om samtidskunst, der nu var blevet meget mere udbredt. III Jeg fik samtidigt lidt mere fodfæste som kunstner og begyndte at se et sted i marginen af kunsten, hvor der kunne blive en plads til mig. Men jeg var også i stigende grad utilpas ved kunstverdenen og i tvivl om, hvordan jeg skulle forholde mig til den. Jeg fik et job på en mindre forberedende kunstskole, der lå så tæt på, at jeg kunne gå derhen. Jeg skulle ikke engang undervise i noget teknisk eller specifikt. Jeg måtte selv bestemme og havde gode kolleger. Hvor jeg på den gamle højskole oftest var alene, var der her et tættere kollegaskab, men også mere struktur. Jeg blev tilbudt at være vikar på et af de mindre akademier, og på den bølge af sympati og interesse fra eleverne, man tit har som ny underviser, blev jeg ansat som professor. Min bankrådgiver ønskede mig tillykke og sagde, at nu kunne hun endelig forstå, hvad jeg lavede. Omgivelserne sænkede skuldrene en anelse af lettelse over, at jeg endelig var kommet tørskoet i land. Jeg var nu blevet underviser i familietraditionen og endda med en fin titel, selvom der kun var 15 timer om ugen på lønsedlen, og lønnen svarede til en rengøringsmedarbejders. Det var dog flere penge og mere stabilitet, end jeg havde prøvet før. Et elleveårigt samarbejde med min kunstneriske samarbejdspartner sluttede, og til min overraskelse forsvandt alle de projekter og planer, der havde været knyttet til vores fælles praksis, med ét. Jeg var nu fuldtidsunderviser på en deltidsløn på et kunstakademi med store ambitioner og få ressourcer. IV Med mig havde jeg en meget intensiv undervisningsform, jeg selv havde bygget op, og en mangel på erfaring med at indgå i et kollegialt fællesskab og have en leder. Der var alt for få ressourcer til alle de behov, der var på akademiet, og kollektivt kæmpede vi for at finde en realistisk måde at drive et ambitiøst akademi med så få midler. Mine kolleger på det lille akademi var for de flestes vedkommende uddannet i udlandet i mere akademiske, angelsaksiske traditioner, hvor undervisningen var formet af research-baserede metoder, pensumlister og en tydeligere adskillelse mellem vejleder og studerende. Jeg kom ud af Det Kongelige Kunstakademi i 00’erne, der befandt sig et sted mellem den klassiske mesterlæremodel fra håndværket og en lokal teoretisk-praktisk undervisningsmodel. Men jeg havde også selv gået på Goldsmiths og havde derfor prøvet den angelsaksiske model. Ingen af de to modeller er ideelle. Hver rummer deres svagheder og styrker. Men den angelsaksiske har vundet hævd på grund af professionalisering og internationalisering, således at de ting, der var gode ved den lokale model, er blevet vasket væk – i hvert fald til dels. Sådanne kulturelle vaner har det dog med at være svære at få has på og overlever tit uerkendt. På Akademiet i København var der en mindre skarp grænse mellem, hvad der var undervisning, og hvad der var at hænge ud sammen; mellem hvad man lærte af sin professor, og hvad man samlede op fra sine medstuderende i fællesværkstederne. Det var ikke nødvendigvis bedre, men det var anderledes, og jeg opdagede, at meget af det, jeg tog for givet som selvfølgeligt ved kunstundervisning, slet ikke var selvfølgeligt. Jeg tænkte, at kunstskolen ikke kun burde rumme elevernes eksperimenter, men også selv eksperimentere med formerne. Jeg ved ikke, hvor godt jeg lykkedes med det. Men jeg ved, at jeg hurtigt kom til at slide mig selv op og gøre en masse, jeg ikke var særligt god til, for at dække hullerne i vores ressourcer og behovene hos vores studerende. V Da barnet ankom, dejligt og smukt et par måneder for tidligt, stod det hurtigt klart for mig, at jeg ikke havde ressourcerne til at kunne gøre det, jeg syntes, der burde gøres. Ét er at undervise med søvnmangel og mudderhjerne, fordi man har en baby, men jeg kunne ikke se, hvordan jeg skulle kunne få det hele til at gå op på længere sigt. Desuden var stemningen blandt kollegerne, eller måske bare inden i mig, ikke længere så støttende, som den havde været. I undervisningen var der fortsat mange slags studerende og en stor spredning i både baggrund og temperament, men mere og mere blev spørgsmålet om, hvordan man kom ind i kunstverdenen og fik succes, til at præge de værkstedssamtaler, der var min yndlingsdel af undervisningen, og som havde været det, siden jeg først begyndte. Den tætte vejledning var der, hvor jeg syntes, det var bedst, og hvor jeg var mest brugbar for mine studerende. Grupper og workshops var jeg mindre god til, på grund af min fornemmelse af, at meget få studerende havde brug for det samme, og at jeg måske heller aldrig selv havde fået så meget ud af de formater. Som den fællesskabsdrømmende individualist jeg er. Som champagneanarkist med billig andelsbolig fra 90’erne i midten af byen og en praksis, der var baseret på at kunne overleve på få ressourcer. Undervisning har været en god anden karriere for mig og for mange andre kunstnere, der ikke kunne tækkes institutioner eller markedet nok til at overleve af det. En måde at blive i kunsten uden at være afhængig af den. Derfor har der også været noget paradoksalt i, at mange af dem, der endte med en sådan delt karriere, har været kritiske over for både markedet og institutionerne. Vi underviste den næste generation i at navigere i systemer, vi selv havde svært ved at finde os til rette i, eller som vi aktivt tog afstand fra. Jeg ved ikke, om det gjorde os til bedre eller dårligere undervisere. Måske begge dele. Det er i hvert fald sikkert, at jeg også selv har bidraget til den pseudo-professionalisering, jeg indimellem rynkede på næsen af. Når jeg hjalp de studerende med at spidse deres porteføljer, lære koderne og tale det rigtige sprog, var jeg jo selv med til at forme dem til det system, jeg egentlig ønskede var anderledes. Jeg blev en pragmatisk fødselshjælper for karrierer i en kunstverden, jeg selv havde et ambivalent forhold til. Min egen kunstnerlivs model, var ikke længere aktuel eller brugbar, når huslejen var blevet astronomisk i byer af alle størrelser, kunstscenen var fokuseret på elitedyrkende karriereprogrammer og institutionerne virkede mest af alt interesserede i at finde lokale variationer af etablerede internationale trends. VI På det lille akademi var der heldigvis en masse, der flyttede væk fra byen og dannede fællesskaber og muligheder for få midler der – ligesom jeg sikkert havde gjort i deres sted. Men mine kræfter var opbrugt. Min selvudviklede døgnundervisningsmodel passede ikke til mit nye liv, og jeg havde lyst til at være meget mere sammen med mit lille barn. Så jeg sagde op. Umiddelbart efter søgte jeg et job på Kunstakademiet i København, hvor der er bedre forhold og ressourcer, men måske også mindre græsrodstraditioner end på de små akademier. Interviewet gik ikke godt, måske fordi jeg egentlig ikke havde lyst til at være fastansat længere og mest ansøgte, fordi jeg ikke vidste, hvad jeg ellers skulle gøre. Så kom kræft, corona og en langsom genopbygning af mig selv som kunstner, efter at de mange års samarbejdets fællesidentitet var gået i opløsning. I dag underviser jeg ikke så meget. Men jeg har nok stadig en underviser inden i mig – og en tendens til at være belærende, som jeg virkelig prøver at holde i ave. Nu skriver jeg mere end nogensinde, og det er måske den mest beslægtede aktivitet: forsøget på at gøre mit eget subjektive punkt tilgængeligt for andre. Jeg tror, at alle kunstnere har brug for at skrive deres egen kunsthistorie ved siden af den, de lærer, og den der står i bøgerne. En personlig version, hvor de selv giver mening, og hvor de forbindelser og forudsætninger, der faktisk betyder noget for ens arbejde, bliver synlige. Dette er selvfølgelig kun én tråd trukket ud af et stort filter af oplevelser. Jeg kunne også have fortalt historien om de utrolige gennembrud i værkstedet, om de øjeblikke hvor undervisningen flød ubesværet, eller om de venskaber og den generøsitet, jeg har mødt hos både studerende og kolleger. Mine år som underviser rummer tusind andre fortællinger, der peger i andre retninger, og erfaringerne er aldrig entydige. Men lige nu er det denne her historie om forandring, vilkår og modstand, der pressede sig på. Med min nuværende ph.d. ved universitetet skal jeg igen prøve at tilpasse selvudviklede undervisningsideer og metoder til institutionelle strukturer og andre fagligheders forventninger. Og alligevel kan jeg ikke lade være med at klikke, hver gang der bliver slået en undervisningsstilling op. Jeg mærker suget og overvejer et kort øjeblik, om det er nu, jeg skal tilbage og bruge mine refleksioner til at blive en bedre underviser. Men jeg ved også godt, at jeg er blevet ældre, særere og stadig befinder mig et sted i marginen. Tanken om at starte min egen lille alternative, eksperimenterende skole strejfer mig tit, men bliver hurtigt fejet af bordet igen; uden massiv støtte ender sådan noget i dag med kun at være for de rige, og det projekt orker jeg ikke. Desuden har jeg jo hele tiden travlt med noget andet, og det er jo ikke det værste.

#stuffiwonderabout #tingjegspørgermigselvom

UFULDSTÆNDIG ØNSKELISTE TIL KUNSTVERDENEN 2025

Fri, 19 Dec 2025 11:35:09 +0100

Denne liste er ikke et manifest fra et “vi”, men noget af mit personlige håb lagt frem til fællesskabet. Det er en øvelse i strategisk naivitet; et forsøg på at insistere på at blive ved med at drømme om det, der virker umuligt i den nuværende logik.

Til Kunstnerne

Jeg ønsker, at kunstnerne selv tager ordet i offentligheden, så vi får flere nuancer frem for kun at høre kuratorer og presse.
Gid kunstnere i by og på land kan se hinanden som kollegaer frem for konkurrenter.
Lad de kunstnere, der har overskud, dele gavmildt med deres kollegaer, når muligheden byder sig.
Jeg drømmer om, at vi udvikler frie arbejdsformer, der gør os mindre afhængige af institutionernes godkendelse.
Lad dem, der kan, prioritere det kunstneriske vovemod højere end den strategiske karriereplanlægning.
Jeg håber, at generationerne vil tale sammen og hjælpe hinanden frem i stedet for at bekrige hinanden.
Må respekten blomstre på tværs af uddannelser, så akademikeren og autodidakten mødes som ligeværdige.
Gid kommunerne vil frede byens og landets åndehuller og sikre billige arbejdsrum frem for mere luksusbyggeri.
Jeg drømmer om, at mangfoldighed bliver en levet praksis i vores fællesskaber, og ikke kun en tekst om inklusion i ansøgningerne.

Til De Kunstnerdrevne og Græsrødderne

Jeg håber på stærke bånd mellem lokale og globale græsrødder i en fælles accept af forskelligheder og fælles interesser.
Lad os se hinanden som et fælles økosystem, hvor vi står stærkere ved at løfte i flok.
Må vi blive bedre til at dele viden og bruge vores platforme til at pege på hinanden.
Jeg håber, at græsrødderne finder selvtilliden til at være et reelt alternativ frem for “lillebror” til institutionerne.
Lad os opfinde helt nye måder at vise kunst og være sammen på i stedet for blot at mime galleriernes hvide vægge.
Jeg drømmer om, at vi inviterer fagfolk fra helt andre områder ind i projekterne, så vi udfordrer vores egne rutiner og udvider kunstens rækkevidde.

Til Markedet og Gallerierne

Må gallerierne lægge hus til eksperimenter og underligheder i pauserne mellem de kommercielle udstillinger, de lever af.
Jeg drømmer om, at gallerierne opretter lønnede jobs til kunstnere med ukommercielle praksisser for at støtte bredden.
Må galleristerne være trofaste partnere, der bliver ved kunstnerens side, også når vinden vender.
Gid markedet vil eksperimentere med nye formater, så kunsten kan nå ud til dem uden store formuer.
Jeg håber, at vi bruger de digitale platforme til at dele viden bevidst, uden at lade algoritmerne diktere, hvad der tæller som relevant.

Til Fondene og Systemet

Jeg håber på en decentralisering, hvor vi styrker de mange små steder frem for at skabe flere mega-institutioner og gigantiske events.
Jeg ønsker, at støttekronerne flyder direkte til kunstnernes liv og værk frem for til tung administration.
Jeg håber, at fondene vil vise tillid og støtte kunsten på dens egne vilde præmisser uden krav om politiske dagsordener.
Lad professionalisering handle om kunstnerisk kvalitet og dedikation i stedet for evnen til at udfylde skemaer.
Jeg håber, at institutionerne og vækstlaget tænkes sammen, så midlerne og viden kan flyde frit imellem dem.
Må midler og strukturer planlægges med langsigtet bæredygtighed for kunstens liv, og ikke kun for effekten af den næste festival.

Til Museerne og Kunsthallerne

Jeg håber, at vi tør skabe og vise værker, hvor materialer og skala er i balance med menneskers tid og opmærksomhed.
Lad demokratiet leve på udstillingsstederne, så de fungerer som eksperimentarier for kollektiv ledelse og flade strukturer.
Må institutionerne ansætte kunstnere i ledende stillinger og ikke kun bruge dem som råstof til udstillingerne.
Jeg drømmer om, at vi eksporterer det unikt lokale og særprægede i stedet for at tilpasse os en international skabelon.
Gid kuratorerne får tid til at forlade kontorerne for at møde kunsten og kunstnerne ude i værkstederne.
Må museerne turde dyrke deres egen særlige niche frem for at jage de samme trends som alle andre.
Jeg ønsker færre sikre succeser og flere modige satsninger på det glemte og det risikable.
Lad os genopdage skattene i magasinerne og de lokale kunstnere frem for altid at jagte den næste dyre låneudstilling.
Jeg håber på en formidling, der inviterer alle ind med et varmt og menneskeligt sprog.
Lad os udvikle en praksis, der tager ansvar for ressourcerne, uden at gå på kompromis med kvaliteten og eksperimentet.

Til Kritikken

Gid der findes midler til en fri kritik, så anmelderne ikke er nødt til at tjene deres løn hos dem, de skal bedømme.
Jeg ønsker en kritik, der gør os klogere med viden og argumenter frem for løse fornemmelser.
Må kritikerne få modet til at gå imod strømmen og punktere hypen, selv når markedet og institutionerne jubler.
Jeg vil selv opsøge kritik fra kollegaer og publikum – også når den er ubehagelig – for at udfordre mine egne vaner.
Jeg drømmer om kritikere, der betragter deres egne tekster som æstetiske objekter på linje med værkerne, og tager ansvar for formens magt.

Til Den Offentlige Samtale

Jeg drømmer om, at kunsten bliver en naturlig del af samfundsdebatten og ikke gemmes væk i livsstilstillægget.
Må kulturjournalisterne blive ved pennen som kritiske stemmer, i stedet for at ende som kommunikationsfolk og spindoktorer.
Må kunstnerne og andre fagfolk være med til at sætte dagsordenen i medierne sammen med journalisterne, så samtalen bliver dybere og rigere.
Jeg håber, at vi som fagfolk forpligter os til at øve os i at tale og skrive, så flest muligt mennesker kan forstå det, helt uden indforståede koder.

Til Mig Selv

Jeg ønsker modet til at indrømme mine fejl uden at blive selvoptaget.
Jeg ønsker at finde arbejdsformer, der sætter mig fri af institutionernes tunge logik uden at flygte fra det fælles ansvar.
Må jeg turde omfavne mine egne modsigelser uden at miste handlekraften eller håbet om, at jeg kan forandres.
Jeg vil igen øve mig i at slippe ideen om geniet og give plads til tvivlen som en styrke.
Jeg håber, at jeg tør lege og fejle uden hele tiden at skele til det færdige resultat og andres meninger.
Jeg vil udforske teknologien i min kunst uden at lade den styre værkets retning eller erstatte det menneskelige nærvær.
Må jeg finde ro i de perioder, hvor intet sker, og livet står i vejen for kunsten.
Jeg håber, at jeg også næste år tør håbe på alt dette og meget mere, selvom intet på denne liste er ankommet.

#stuffiwonderabout #tingjegspørgermigselvom

Magt cirkulerer sjældent frivilligt

Thu, 18 Dec 2025 13:36:42 +0100

5 Når man sidder i udvalg eller bestyrelser, er man tit ikke enig i alle beslutninger. Især ikke, hvis man er lidt kontrær, som jeg er. Men alligevel bakker man selvfølgelig op om de fælles beslutninger. Både af kollegial solidaritet, og fordi alt andet ville være noget rod. På den måde føler man sig ofte magtesløs, selvom man måske ser magtfuld ud. Man bliver en del af den orden, man gerne ville ændre. Men der er også et kollegaskab på tværs af fag og generationer. De fælles beslutninger og kompromiser er ikke kun tvang, de er også nødvendige og lærerige. Men her lurer faren. For min empati med systemets stressede ansatte har en slagside. Den risikerer at skubbe de ekskluderede helt ud af billedet. Det er let at være generøs over for systemets fejlbarlighed, når man selv sidder med ved bordet. For dem, der står udenfor, er det ligegyldigt, om afslaget skyldes ondskab eller travlhed. De er ikke bare “strukturelle effekter”, men mennesker med legitime krav. Og min forståelse for maskinrummet må ikke skygge for deres vrede. Der er så mange ting, jeg ikke forstod, hvorfor var som de var, inden jeg selv tog del i det kunstpolitiske arbejde. Og som jeg stadig ikke har forstået. Nuancer og mekanismer, jeg ikke kunne se udefra. Kompleksiteter og sårbarheder, der først blev synlige, da jeg sad med ved bordet. For når man kommer helt ind i institutionerne, opdager man, hvor sårbare de er. De er fulde af underfinansierede udstillinger fra den tidligere ledelse. De er fulde af ting, man har lovet fondene, men ikke har ressourcerne til at realisere. Man ser tilfældighederne i de valg, der tages. Man mærker, at valg, der udefra ser strategiske og velovervejede ud, ofte er opstået i panik og kortsigtede planer. Institutionens fornemste opgave bliver ofte at få det tilfældige til at ligne en vision. I værste fald opstår et ekko-kammer, hvor pseudo-kritikkens symbolske retorik hersker. Mens magten forbliver uerkendt og uforhandlet. Det gør det vanskeligt faktisk at diskutere magt og rejse egentlig kritik. Fordi den risikerer at blive til endnu en tom gestus. Inde fra maskinrummet ser man, at magt og tilfælde er mere beslægtede, end man skulle tro. At bekendte kunstnere vælges, fordi der ikke er ressourcer til research eller tid til studiobesøg hos dem, man ikke kender. At dagsordener og formuleringer genbruges, fordi fondsansøgningen skal afleveres i morgen. Det er ikke en konspiration. Det er bare ressourcemangel og frygt. Sådan som jeg har oplevet det, er magtens forhandling for det meste banal og blind, frem for en del af en masterplan eller sammensværgelse. Der sidder sjældent en ond skurk for bordenden. Der sidder bare en stresset administrator og pressede ansatte, uden det overblik de bliver tillagt. Kunstverdenens problemer skyldes oftere fejltagelser og travlhed, der trives godt i det skjulte, frem for egentlig ondskab eller vilje til magt. Men jeg må spørge mig selv: Er beskrivelsen af magten som “banal” i virkeligheden dens bedste forsvar? Ved at fremstille den som inkompetence og tilfældigheder, risikerer jeg at afpolitisere den. At gøre den til en naturkraft, ingen styrer. Og dermed ingen kan holdes ansvarlig for. For mangel på ondskab fritager ikke for ansvar. Travlhed ekskluderer lige så effektivt som bevidst diskrimination. Resultaterne er de samme, og magtforholdet består. Ikke at der ikke findes reelt magtmisbrug og bevidste ressourceforskelle. Men de er som regel et symptom på noget andet end forhandlingen af magten i sig selv. De er symptomer på et inkompetent magtmaskineri, der kører ude af syne, hvis ingen aktivt griber ind. For magt er også kampen om ressourcer og fordeling af privilegier. Millimeter for millimeter og møde for møde. Den daglige forhandling om hvem der får penge, tid, opmærksomhed. Det er ikke altid tilfældigt eller inkompetent. Nogle gange er det bare kamp om begrænsede midler. Netop fordi maskineriet kører på både inkompetence og konkurrence, bliver ansvaret ikke mindre. Det bliver bare mere diffust. Sværere at placere, men ikke mindre reelt. Derfor forsøger jeg at insistere på en form for metapolitisk praksis. Hvor man vedbliver med at foreslå alternativer. At sige – så venligt som muligt – at det kunne være anderledes. At bruge sproget til at åbne vejen for forandring, konceptuelt. At plante idéen om, at tingene ikke behøver at være, som de plejer. Det går langsomt. Det er ikke særligt heroisk. Og det risikerer altid at blive en dårlig undskyldning for ikke at gøre noget radikalt. Et alibi for at blive siddende. For alle systemer favoriserer nogen og ekskluderer andre. Den formelle struktur favoriserer nogle, den uformelle andre. Ingen form er neutral. Men problemet opstår, når formen stivner. Når vi rammes af en institutionel forstening. Hvor vaner bliver til regler, og regler bliver til mure. Når systemets primære drift bliver selvopretholdelse frem for udvikling. Så bliver institutionerne til monolitter. Tunge og ubevægelige kolosser, der bruger al deres energi på bare at bestå. Frem for at være de levende organismer, kunsten har brug for. Desuden individualiseres magten. Den gøres diffus af den interne konkurrence, de stejle hierarkier og jagten på den næste karrieremulighed. Denne atomisering gør det svært at finde sammen. Svært at opbygge den tillid, der skal til for at handle kollektivt. Og dermed næsten umuligt at mønstre den fælles magt, der skal til for at gøre en reel forskel. Derfor virker det oplagt at skabe mange midlertidige, ustabile og forskellige magtstrukturer frem for at vedligeholde disse magtmonopoler. At insistere på en pluralitet af adgangsveje i stedet for én “rigtig” måde at være en del af systemet på. At lade magten cirkulere gennem forskellige rum og former, så flere kan finde indgang. At turde lade strukturerne dø, når de bliver for stive, og bygge nye. Og vi må være ærlige: Det kommer ikke til at ske uden friktion. Magt cirkulerer sjældent frivilligt. At skabe plads til andre betyder, at nogen skal afgive plads. At privilegier skal dø, for at noget nyt kan leve. Men institutionerne har ikke altid været sådan. Der er en historie for, at de har været mere åbne og eksperimenterende. Korte perioder, hvor de turde tage chancer på det ukendte i stedet for at cirkle rundt om det bekendte. Hvor de brugte deres ressourcer på at udvide feltet i stedet for at reproducere det. Det uforløste potentiale ligger stadig der, bag forsteningen. Det kræver bare, at flere aktivt vælger at bruge den magt, de har, til at hugge facaden op og skabe forandring. Frem for at forsvare de bestående strukturer. #stuffiwonderabout #tingjegspørgermigselvom