20 Jan 2014

Captive Portal #1: Locative Text at 5 Locations in Copenhagen

Art when you least of all expected it

Being in the right place with your smartphone ready. This is all you need to visit the new Art Project in Copenhagen. You get art, when you log in on a wireless network.
COPENHAGEN – Maybe you are confused, you walk around somewhere in Copenhagen, and what you don't have is an internet connection, so that Google Maps may assist you. All networks demand passwords except for one named Captive Portal. You log on, but instead of a map of the city a work of art pops up on your screen. This is what you may see in five different places in Copenhagen starting on January 17th. Behind this surprising new exhibition Site-specific Text is Kristoffer Ørum, visual artist and professor at the Academy of Fine Arts in Odense.

Art becomes part of the air we breathe

Kristoffer Ørum had the idea to exhibit wireless art works when, one day, he was looking out from his flat near Nyhavn. What he saw through the window was a large number of tourists milling around with their smartphones above their heads attempting to capture open networks. He looked out and thought: Private space is in the streets and there is a public eagerly pursuing it. Suppose you gave them art and not just an internet connection.
This was the start of Captive Portal. We open Site-specific Text with five different artists from here and abroad who exhibit their work in five different places in Copenhagen. Each location is a wireless network. Some of the art works are sheltered in private homes, others are located in public buildings, and one is placed in a restaurant.

Reading as art
The exhibition Site-specific Text was born out of Kristoffer Ørum's fascination with reading. Everywhere in public space people were reading: In libraries, in cafés, in city squares. But you also see people reading on busses, going from one place to the other, as well as on side-walks and on bikes. Texts, it appears, are with us everywhere, and reading is a form of communication.

In order to examine text and reading in public space , Kristoffer Ørum had the idea to use Captive Portal's five wireless networks to do 'something involving text'. He invited five visual artists from Denmark and abroad to create a digital exhibition for each individual wireless network, the only requirement being that their works should be based on text and relate to the location where it can be read and the way it is read.

The five artists Cia Rinne, Ursula Andkjær Olsen, Vanessa Place, Christian Schmidt-Rasmussen og Vladas Suncovas & Kristian Byskov, have produce five very different art works, each of which is specifically related to its location i Copenhagen.

MORE INFORMATION ABOUT CAPTIVE PORTAL
Site-specific Art – here and only here the texts may be studied in the period from January 17th to February 19th. The exhibition is open twentyfour hours.
Nyhavn, Restaurant Cap Horn. Captive Horn created by the Danish- German-Finnish poet and artists Cia Rinne.
Mjølnerparken. Where are you, and what are you doing? created by the poet Ursula Andkjær Olsen.
Enghavevej, at KPH Projects. LOGIN created by the American artist and lawyer Vanessa Place.

Valby, library, Borgerservice!!! created by visual artist Christian Schmidt-Rasmussen.
Brumleby. Blob Project created by visual artist Vladas Suncovas & Kristian Byskov.

You can find the specific locations of the texts on a map at cp.oerum.org. Bring a smartphone along, a tablet or laptop with a wireless and log on to the network 'Captive Portal' to be admitted to the texts.
The idea of Captive Portal is to create an international wireless network for digital distribution of art material. The idea is also to create a non-profit alternative to existing channels like book shops, galleries and museums.

Nobody involved – artists, journalists, programmers, the people hosting the wireless netrworks and those who have donated hardware – are paid for their time. Read more on cp.oerum.org