I’m Kjartan Abel, and I became an artist at 30 by accident, with an umbrella and some creative lies about software.
I was working as a webmaster at Fast Search & Transfer when a former colleague called – could I come fix the computer lab at this art school? Walking through Strykejernet art school, I had one of those lightning-bolt moments: This is what I’m supposed to be doing. I’d never liked art because I’d never seen art that was technology-first. This place was different.
I quit my job and applied to art school. For my portfolio, I needed ten pieces. One was called “Araply” – a speaker mounted on an umbrella that played random fragments from an Ari Behn audiobook. I told people I’d written software to select the clips, but really I’d just chopped up a radio interview into mp3 files and set them to shuffle in Winamp. People loved it. The wordplay (paraply/Araply/Anodorhynchus – I thought I was so clever), the absurdity of standing under an umbrella listening to scattered stories – it worked.
That umbrella taught me everything: take everyday objects, add some technology, see what happens.
These days I’m back where I started in some ways – doing web development and museum work at Østfoldmuseene. It feels like Groundhog Day sometimes, except now I’m the person they call when they need impossible things to work. Need to hack ten vintage telephones so visitors can pick them up and hear stories? I’ll add some Adafruit boards. Want to turn a WWII bunker into a VR experience? Give me a 360° camera and a weekend. Building an interactive game where kids use cipher wheels and UV flashlights to help Jewish families escape to Sweden? Let me fire up the Python code and dust off my Arduino skills.
I’ve made hamsters into unwitting surveillance subjects (until one escaped during a party). I’ve turned receipt machines into random music generators. I built a waiting room where you could meet your future self and get a ticket to prove it happened. I made people walk along cassette tape stuck to gallery walls to hear a recording – no way to pause without stopping entirely, like modern life itself.
But somehow the museum work feels like the natural evolution of that umbrella moment. I’m still taking ordinary things – old phones, historical artifacts, empty rooms – and making them tell stories in ways they were never designed to do. The difference is now I actually know how to make the software work instead of faking it.
What I Actually Believe
I give my music away under a Creative Commons license because art should be a conversation, not a commodity. I’ve been on the wrong side of paywalled culture enough times to feel strongly about that.
Most of my work comes back to the same question: what happens when you put technology somewhere it wasn’t designed to go? Sometimes the answer is interesting. Sometimes a hamster escapes. Usually both.
I tend to arrive at things early. Interactive museum installations before museums wanted them. AI conversations before anyone called them that. Surveillance art before surveillance was the default. I’m not sure that’s a skill so much as a personality trait with occasionally useful consequences.
Background
MFA, UCL Slade School of Fine Art. BA First Class Honours, Kingston University. Foundation at Strykejernet. Audio engineering at NISS. Over twenty years building web solutions, mostly for cultural institutions, mostly involving accessibility, always involving more PHP than I’d like to admit.
The umbrella was just the beginning.