Dora Vrhoci is game designer, specialized in narrative design and game writing, and digital creator based in Rotterdam, The Netherlands. Vrhoci started creating digital collages in 2020 to document the color palettes that paint her everyday life and gradually developed an aesthetic inspired by spontaneous digital cuts and glitches. Prior to the exhibiting with M.A.D.S., Vrhoci’s work was featured in Fragmented Collective’s printed publication Future (2022).
My creative process is heavily influenced by the perceptual phenomenon synesthesia, and my works emerge from color sensations triggered by music. Every song, especially post-rock and similar genres, triggers involuntary associations of different colors that allow me to quickly build a network of associations that turns into a color palette. That palette, then, starts emanating a certain mood or evokes images of landscapes and entities that inhabit them that create a unique collage. I primarily work with digital collages due to the feeling of anticipation that comes when a software is about to cut or manipulate an image. Most of the time, the result is unexpected, and it feels as though the collage is co-created by me and the software. Another reason for this is my background in game design, which made digital tools almost second nature to me. My work explores macabre or dark themes, such as crime, the relationship between the mind and the heart and its consequences, distant and urban landscapes, and anonymity. My aesthetic draws inspiration from artist Max Ernst, especially his collage book Une semaine de bonté (1934), poet Charles Baudelaire and his poetics of the ugly or disgusting, and glitch art.