Reception Saturday, July 19, 5–7pm

Anthony Discenza and Torsten Z. Burns, known collectively as the HalfLifers, have been working with zombie-characters in their collaborative video work since 1994. The HalfLifers exhume cinema's favorite incarnation of mindless, decaying mortality in the hopes of breathing new life into this misunderstood figure. From a panel discussion in an old TV studio to a quarantined helicopter high above California's rolling hills, these life-challenged entities walk, talk, and chew over some of the more difficult questions of this "whole linear birth-death system." Featured in the Video Project Room, AfterLifers: Walking and Talking (Exten-dead version), 2004–2008, presents Discenza and Burns in character acting out the characteristics of zombies. Over the past 15 years, the duo's work has been screened extensively in numerous national and international venues, including The New York Video Festival, The IMPAKT festival, ZKM, The THAW Festival, the Stuttgart Filmwinter Festival, Cinema Texas, ZKM, The Pacific Film Archive, The Headlands Center for the Arts, The Whitney Museum of American Art, New Langton Arts, and the Museum of Modern Art in New York. HalfLifers are distributed by the Video Databank of Chicago. Currently, they are at work on a multi-disk survey of their past projects.

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