Jason Bulluck

My work represents an endeavor to generate anti-hegemonic possibilities for exploring material relationships between people, space and one another through competitive and experientially verifiable descriptions of reality. By competitive, I mean the production of situations and objects–across a range of media, to include sculpture, drawing and painting, photography, film and performance–that juxtapose Western with non-Western epistemologies.

In my recent work, including material production and writing, I have been exploring the possibilities of Zen as counter-oppressive and, in the least, intellectually liberating as a theoretical basis for art making. In service of Zen’s potential for offering an additional counter to the often totalising epistemic and ontological models operating in contemporary discourse I have looked to the digital database as point-of-reference and analogue for some of Zen’s basic tenets.

I am particularly interested in how relational database theory (and other more recently developed database management systems), along with Buddhist arguments for interdependent origination–where any discrete existence can be understood as relying on previous cause and consequential effect–might offer more nuanced and complete descriptions of and explanations for a range of identities, events and geographies. I wonder how these investigations might be communicated on their own terms and could operate as complicating factors for critical discourse. I am curious furthermore, at how objects and situations created accordingly might operate to mitigate subaltern experience.