The Shape Something Takes when Passing Through at Dansk Datahistorisk Museum, Hedehusene

There is an innate physical implication to the act of passing through. Say, a body bending microwaves as it records its own movement, hot bronze settling into symbolic form, or early code prompting the splintering of a hummingbird. Energy meets resistance, resistance pushes back. A movement instigated by a certain amount of force, triggering a degree of impact, a shape. Form is created through interference, meaning develops in the transition between one state and another. Objects, systems, and languages all bear traces of such movement, of translation, delay, repetition. What poisons one body sustains another, habits of recognition realign. Say, the hide of a stillborn calf held by Perspex, interception turning time ornamental, like a latent being nesting in a vigorously wired chrysalis.

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Public Domain Operating System is a series of exhibitions taking place at Dansk Datahistorisk Museum (Danish Data History Museum), from late 2025 to late 2027. The inaugural exhibition coincides with the 100-year anniversary of quantum mechanics in 2025, the scientific breakthrough that redefined the relationship between observation and reality itself, raising questions that continue to shape understandings of matter, mind and computation, with their projected impacts exponentially unfolding.

The exhibitions integrate contemporary works into the museum’s collection, workspaces and archives, among mechanical counting devices, components of Denmark’s first computer DASK (Dansk Aritmetisk Sekvens-Kalkulator, nicknamed the Electro Brain, originally built into an entire villa), as well as rare mainframes, early personal computers, and pivotal developments in global computing history.

Rather than a fascination with technology, the exhibitions use it in dialogue with the temporal remove inherent in a museum setting as a framework for reflecting on cultural shifts across time, addressing post-digital conditions and emerging forms such as artificial intelligence, generative media, quantum computing, neurotechnology, and synthetic biology, while situated in the histories that shape the present. The exhibitions explore how such developments reconfigure power and identity, govern access and knowledge, challenge ecology and ethics, and extend the boundaries of perception and consciousness.

Throughout history, the adoption of tools has rarely been dictated from above, but shaped collectively, as communities experiment and choose what proves useful. Today, knowledge and participation have expanded, even as the architectures of technology and thought are increasingly constructed elsewhere. Evolution and invention remain human traits, but technologies function and endure only when rooted in the practice of the people who use it.