Captive Portal 2: The Wireless Touch
Location:
Captive Portal, Copenhagen, DK
Captive II: The Wireless Touch / Den Trådløse berøring
Being in the right place with your smartphone on hand is all you need to visit the new Art Project in Copenhagen. You get art when you log into a wireless network.
Imagine that you walk around confused somewhere in Copenhagen and want Google maps to help you navigate. So you look for a Wi-Fi, but they all ask for passwords until you come across one called Captive Portal. You log on and instead of a city map, a work of art pops up on your screen. This is what has been happening at five different locations in Copenhagen since January 17 where five artists have created works for Captive Portal I.
From February 21 - April 1, Captive Portal II will supply five new artworks in all of the five locations.
Captive Portal I focused on how text is affected by its means of distribution.
Captive Portal II asks what wireless materiality is: The five new projects all explore the digital interfaces that take up still more of our attention and teach us to navigate radically different kinds of information in the same way: by swiping or pinching our way though the increasingly blurry territory between the fictional worlds of computer games, the supposedly credible information of Wikipedia or Google Maps, and the physical objects that this flow of information inhabits.
The five invited artist all question our interaction with the invisible wireless networks all around us.
Poet and photographer Christian Yde Frostholm's personal mapping of the area around Enghave raises the question of whether his version is less true or informative than the supposedly objective and unbiased version served up by Goggle Maps.
Recent graduate of the royal Danish academy of art, Anna Ørberg's contribution focuses on its location in the local community of Brumleby and how networks and communities have a tendency to become exclusive rather than inclusive.
In four videos the American media artist Angela Washko uses the computer game “The Sims” to reflect on the connection between free will and architecture. Danish artist Hannah Heilmanns project is an advertisement for an on-going project of collecting used contact lenses to make sculptures based on all the things these lenses have seen.
Danish artist Mogens Jacobsens project takes Jørgen Leths film from 1967 "The Perfect Human" as its point of departure in an examination of how contemporary media create absurd situations.
Captive Portal operates without public funding, based instead on donated hardware and the work of volunteers. We are situated outside traditional channels of distribution or funding for the arts in Denmark. This enables us to remain relatively free of the need to legitimize ourselves through numbers of attendance, notions of public relevance or commercial appeal. Captive Portal II is the second of three pilot projects. They take place before the more permanent establishment of Captive Portal as an international non-profit network. The purpose of these three pilot projects is to examine the long-term viability of Captive Portal and to serve as an inspiration for future projects carried out on the network by others.
MORE INFORMATION ABOUT CAPTIVE PORTAL
Site-specific Art – here and only here the art may be seen from February 21 to April 1. The exhibition is open every day at all hours.
Nyhavn, Restaurant Cap Horn. "igen idag…" by visual artist Mogens Jacobsen.
Mjølnerparken. “Free Will Mode” by visual artist Angela Washko.
Enghavevej, at KPH Projects. “My Local Network” by writer and photographer Christian Yde Frostholm
Valby, public library, “Having No Soul” created by visual artist Hannah Heilmann.
Brumleby, “Det Lokale Netværk” by visual artist Anna Ørberg.
You can find the specific locations of the texts on a map at http://cp.oerum.org. Bring a smartphone along, a tablet or laptop with a wireless and log on to the network ‘Captive Portal’ to enter.
With Captive Portal, we want to create an international wireless network for digital distribution of art material. In time, we hope that Captive Portal will be a non-profit alternative to existing channels such as bookshops, galleries and museums.
Nobody involved – artists, journalists, programmers, the people hosting the wireless networks and those who have donated hardware – is paid for their time. Read more on http://cp.oerum.org
