Abigail Tulenko wants to know what it’s like to be a person, and why it’s like anything at all.
I. As a philosopher, she studies consciousness and the metaphysics of experience. She is currently completing her PhD at Harvard. Her dissertation pursues a novel account of the structure of phenomenal experience. She is also interested in how these questions meet the philosophy of science: what the hard problem of consciousness means for our picture of physical reality, and what it would take for a complete science to account for experience.
II. Her other philosophical interests include: Plato, Iris Murdoch, the laws of nature, quantum interpretation, spacetime, panpsychism, mystical experience, the philosophy of literature, attention, and anti-carceral approaches to justice.
III. As a photographer, she approaches the same questions in a space beyond language: what can be surfaced of another person's inner life, and what is irreducibly hidden? She is interested in externalizing interior worlds, attempting the quality of attention Iris Murdoch describes as "a just and loving gaze directed upon an individual reality."
IV. She works across analog film, cyanotype, and anthotype. She is drawn to old processes- to UV light and plant pigments and direct contact- because they make visible something that digital photography conceals: that an image is a physical event, a trace left by the presence of a body in light. She is obsessed with the color blue.
V. Her writing has appeared in Scientific American, Aeon, and elsewhere. Her images in Vogue Arabia, Harper's Bazaar, and L'Officiel & beyond.
VI. She is a member of Gaza Champions, a global mutual aid community. You can support their work here.
VII. Connect:
https://www.instagram.com/abigailtulenko/
are.na : research and visual thinking
VIII. Academic CV available here.
