Budor’s presentation of her work maps out her research on digital vampires, the a-historicity of the CGI image, and use of special effects in film in relation to the labor of the undead and fictionalized histories. The talk focuses on the loss of bodies and images caused by digital postproduction and their disembodiment; locating the cinematic space halfway between being alive and dead, its behavior becomes similar to a virus or a parasite. This cinematic body, having the semblance and feeling of life, is still not one of organic origin. It procreates a new type of alien sensuality, no longer morphing just time and appearance, but modifying its genetic structure from within.

Dora Budor (b. 1984 in Croatia) is a New York-based artist. With an interest in cinematic space, her work explores the representations of emotion, physical experience, the ideological subtext, and the capital of affect, particularly as they manifest in Hollywood’s systems of production. Often building on props used onscreen, castoff special effects, and other materials integral to cinematic production, her protean objects function as organic semiconductors that mediate encounters between spectator and object, fictional histories and lived experiences.