Dora Budor: The Preserving Machine

Dora Budor’s installation The Preserving Machine forms a part of the In Search of the Present exhibition. This site-specific adaptation of the work is a yellow enclosure inside which a lone robotic bird flies over a landscape composed of architectural remains and debris sourced from the vicinity of the museum. The bird’s trajectory is based on a motion vector derived from composer Magnus Lindberg's music score.

The title of the work, The Preserving Machine, is borrowed from a 1953 short story by Philip K. Dick in which people attempt to preserve classical music during a cultural collapse by encoding musical notes into animals. However, mutations in the animals render the musical works unrecognisable – nature and culture compete for existence.

Dora Budor (b. 1984) is a New York-based Croatian artist. Budor uses the exhibition itself as her medium, amplifying, dislodging or re-circuiting the characteristics of the context and thereby constructing an interdependency between the work and its host. Employing the phenomenological apparatus of the cinema, she produces images that act as conduits of memory and meaning.