Stephen Medaris Bull

Bull's early media work includes directing the documentary Margaret Sanger: A Public Nuisance, distributed by Women Make Movies, which profiles the activist's use of mass culture to advocate for birth control.^[6] He is also listed in the Film-Makers’ Cooperative catalogue, which documents additional short works and provides a professional biography of his mixed-media practice.^[7]

From the mid-2000s, Bull focused on mobile phone based artworks under the umbrella project Cellphonia, a participatory system that composes and streams audience-contributed vocals captured over telephony.^[2] Cellphonia projects were presented at the ISEA ZeroOne festival in San Jose in 2006, among other venues documented by festival and institutional archives.^[2] His installation Cellphonia: 4'33" was included in the installation proceedings of the International Conference on New Interfaces for Musical Expression in 2009.^[8] He has worked with institutions such as the New York State Council on the Arts, Experimental Television Center, and Harvestworks.^[1]

Bull produced mobile tours for cultural institutions, including work commissioned by the New-York Historical Society connected to its two-year initiative on the history of slavery in New York, which developed walking and mobile phone tours as part of public programming.^[9]

In response to respiratory-care needs highlighted during the COVID-19 pandemic, Bull founded an effort later known as Breathe Global to advance a portable negative pressure ventilator concept called Venti, which was informed by his patent filings and community prototyping.^[5] He worked with a high school student to assemble and test early versions of a wearable iron lung device during the initial pandemic wave.^[10][11]

Bull's practice intersects with research in mobile music, ubiquitous computing, and human participation in instrument design, with documentation of his installations and methods in the NIME installation proceedings and in the archival record of ISEA.^[8][2] His work also extends to speculative engineering and aerospace concepts; the United States Patent and Trademark Office records show he was granted a patent in 1988 for a space station designed to be launched as a single payload and then deployed in orbit.^[12] Subsequent intellectual property disclosures include a 2022 United States patent application for a cuirass-style negative pressure ventilator with reconfigurable components and Internet of Things capabilities.^[5]