Body Horror is a lecture-performance that reimagines airport security through the genre of body horror cinema, with millimeter wave body scans and biometric diagrams as key protagonists. Such digital bodies—captured from embodied persons—exist for the sake of risk preemption. But how do these bodies invoke fear or terror, when—no matter how violently examined—they appear to be free of the horrors of bodily violation? No blood or fluids spill, no flesh rips, no voices scream out. In the absence of graphic horror, a strangely desirable horror of digital abstraction pervades.

The Body Horror lecture-performance is a companion piece to Blas’s Silicon Traces trilogy, a series of moving image installations that contends with the beliefs, fantasies, and histories influential to Silicon Valley’s visions of the future. This lecture-performance connects to the artwork Sanctum (2018).