A son of the cloth and a product of boarding school, Bull set out for Paris in 1968, wandered the museums of Europe, played in blues bands, attended the New School of Art in Toronto and held a variety of odd jobs (tobacco picker, brakeman, bartender) before joining the Western Front not long after it was founded in 1973. It was here that he met Kate Craig, Eric Metcalfe and other artists with whom he has artists with whom he has worked closely ever since.
Influenced by mail art, Fluxus and the emergence of new media, he began to experiment with performance and radio. In 1976 he collaborated with Patrick Ready in the formation of the HP Radio Show, a weekly broadcast on CFRO-FM which explored the possibilities of radio as an art medium. With other Western Front artists he formed Canada Shadows, touring Europe twice with shadow plays that combined electronic music, movement, multi-lingual text, various kinds of light, projection and screens.
In 1980-81 he left Vancouver for an extended trip around the world with Kate Craig, meeting artists in Asia, Africa and Europe. Since then he has been committed to international exchange, telecommunications and video. As well as video collaborations with Eric Metcalfe, Antoni Muntadas and others, in 1985 he curated INFERMENTAL VI, a six-hour compendium of video from 25 countries. He has contributed to the Venice Biennale, Dokumenta and has works in the collections of the New York Museum of Modern Art and the Montreal Museum of Contemporary Art. He continues to work as an administrator and curator at the Western Front. In recent years he has organized exhibitions by William S. Burroughs and cross-Canada tours for a number of Japanese performance artists. He is currently involved in networked multimedia projects for the Western Front and works in the local community to develop the relation between culture and ecology. He spends his summers in the bush where he paints landscapes as a hobby.
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front@mindlink.bc.ca