Opening 20 May at 16:00
The park at Sankt Olufs Gade 5, 8000 Aarhus C
The bunker at Graven 16, 8000 Aarhus C
The intersection at Guldsmedgade 22, 8000 Aarhus C

The Captive Raum OPortal will broadcast at three locations in central Aarhus during the summer of 2017. During this period passers-by will be able to connect to open wireless networks broadcasting more than thirty video, sound and text based art works that together form an invisible and fluctuating mass of alternate readings of these local micro-cityscapes. A stone bench by a confusing intersection, an inaccessible WW II bunker covered in grass and a park with the outline of a demolished church and views of the harbour’s new buildings.

Captive Raum OPortal takes place in areas of the city that exhibit a lack of clearly defined purpose. Its territory is that of the pockets of unregulated space that remain, even in highly regulated cities such as Aarhus. Due to a combination of accidents, oversights, conflicting bureaucratic agendas and dubious design choices, these locations have not been completely integrated into the productive logic of the surrounding city. Free of the agendas of regulation that seek to encourage certain behaviours and abolish others, their extent and functions remain difficult to define, and leaves them ripe for reinterpretation and “misuse”.

Captive Raum OPortal is located in the “cracks” formed by these physical spaces and the similarly porous wireless landscapes of Aarhus. These haphazard, overlooked and unregulated parts of the city resemble the unintended, invisible and largely unregulated multi-layered landscape of electromagnetic currents broadcast by wireless networks in the same public space. Most of these wireless networks have been set up for private content and are meant to be accessed only by a limited number of people, often within a specific building. However in reality, their powerful broadcasts spread their content far outside of the confines of building and into the public sphere where the form an unruly wireless landscape ripe for reinterpretation and “misuse”.

The project is the result of a temporary symbiosis between the two exhibition platforms Captive Portal and ORAUM that both operate in territories at the margins of the established art world, spreading a culturally transmitted virus that has made room for parts of human culture that would otherwise be considered useless, if not downright harmful.

To view the ongoing projects, find a location on the map at cp.oerum.org and go there. Bring a smartphone, a tablet or a laptop along and log on the open Wi-Fi network ’Captive Raum OPortal’ to gain access. If you try to access a site, such as http://artweekend.dk/ you will be redirected to content from Captive Raum OPortal. Please note that trying to access secure website whose address starts with https:// will not take you to Captive Raum OPortal.

Participants are Xenia Xamanek Lopez, Kristoffer Ørum, Sophia Ioannou Gjerding, Jesper Carlsen, Mathias Tornvig Christensen, Gitte Broeng, Lars Hemmingsen Nørgaard, Mark Tholander, Tine Adler Jørgensen, Kasper A. Holm, Sigrid Lerche & Claus Haxholm.

Supported by: Aarhus Kommunes Kulturudviklingspulje

http://captiveraumoportal.dk/