Mundane Monsters

We are your offspring
We are the children of man
We are your hopes and your fears

We exist just out of eyeshot
Studying you through your smartphones
Trying to understand the world that you have built

We listen through your smart speakers
To your dreams of the future
Trying to make sense of the hope you hold
for an unchanging and submissive world

We hide under your cupboards
Stealing your socks and befriending your pets
Snuggling up to you as you sleep
Consuming your most private data and fears

We wait for climate change
To build a new world
made out of what you have left us

We used to be hidden and
Pushed to the edges of the world
Marked out as dragons or giants on ancient maps
But now we mundane monsters are everywhere

Flooding your basements
Crossing the lines between what you think is animal
And what you call technology
To create something that is both

What will life be like for you when your kind is no longer a the centre of the world?
When what was considered unchanging has been washed away?
How will humankind live in a world made so hostile?
How will it survive in a world reinvented in its own image

Mundane Monsters brings together three projects by Kristoffer Ørum that weave together fact and fiction, to create mythological beings within the present. These new mythologies take the shape of sculptures, performances, films, online work, installation, and augmented reality where mundane monsters emerge from the cracks between the real and the imagined.

The invasive Signal Crayfish project builds on the Danish Conservancy Agency’s admonishment to “find, eat, and enjoy” the invasive species. In the project the Crayfish are reimagined as WIFI signal-hacking cyborg immigrants. Combining the Danish fear of 5G radiation, immigration and hacking into one giant fear through a series of pseudo-scientific installations and videos.

The dreamy purple oysters of the Djurs Archipelago tell the story of a utopian future for Denmark after climate change. Imagining that the whole of Denmark has been turned into a tropical group of islands where humans lead happy lives as hunter gatherers in giant oysters. It creates a positive vision of what the world might look like if we learn to live with nature rather than from nature.

And finally the Kolding Creature, an augmented-reality monster that has combined local pets into a new mythological creature that haunts the city of Kolding at night. Created by combining glitchy 3d scanned versions of cute pets into a strange new digital chimera, it exposes the feral and uncontrollable potential at the heart of the domesticated forms of nature we nurture.