Zach Blas:  BUNKER EPYLLION

Bunker Epyllion (2026) is a single-channel video installation comprised of text, live-action videography, and computer graphics. It tells the story of Trident Lakes, an abandoned luxury bunker site near Ector, Texas, as an epic fantasy critiquing American prepper culture. Trident Lakes is presented as a bombastic example of apocalyptic aspirations endemic to the nation, from rural survivalists and Christian nationalists to tech industry elites.

Part doomsday bunker compound, part luxury country club resort community, Trident Lakes was a 700-acre, $300 million development advertised as a “five-star playground with DEFCON 1 preparedness.” A 50-foot-tall marble fountain, the only structure built before the project’s abandonment in 2018, remains at the site’s entrance, still surveilled and inaccessible to the public. The top of the fountain was intended to feature a massive sculpture of Poseidon holding a golden trident, but assembly was halted when the figure was damaged during construction.

In Bunker Epyllion, Poseidon’s destruction catalyzes the creation of another fountain below the surface: an upside-down, underground inversion of the structure. An epyllion, a short narrative poem in the style of an ancient Greek epic, describes the fate of an unnamed tech billionaire who shelters in this stronghold, recounted by the fountain’s entourage of mythic characters. 

Both architectural site and political imaginary, luxury doomsday bunkers like those planned for Trident Lakes are dramatic manifestations of an apocalyptic vision for the future in which survival requires extreme isolation and is reserved for only the wealthiest individuals in the world.

Bunker Epyllion is a companion piece to Blas’ Silicon Traces series, a trilogy of moving image installations and related works that contends with the histories, philosophies, beliefs, fictions, and fantasies that shape Silicon Valley’s visions of the future as means to domination.


Writer, Director, Producer, and Artist: Zach Blas

Project Manager, Lead Researcher, Project Development, Poem and Script Development, and Editor: Talia Golland

Computer Graphics Artist: Tim Dalzell

Graphic Design: Riccardo Righi

Video Editor: Martin Gajc

About the Artist

Zach Blas is an artist, writer, and filmmaker whose practice contends with computational technologies, their industries, and the powers that constitute and animate them. Forefronting critical inquiry, technical experimentation, and concept engineering, Blas creates installations that feature moving image and sculpture, films and videos, lecture-performances, publications, and web-based media.

Blas has exhibited in major international exhibitions including the 82nd Whitney Biennial (New York City), 12th Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art, and 12th Gwangju Biennale. He has also presented solo exhibitions at Vienna Secession, Van Abbemuseum (Eindhoven), Abierto x Obras at Matadero Madrid, and Gasworks (London).

His publications include the artist book Ass of God: Collected Heretical Writings of Salb Hacz (Vienna Secession and Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther und Franz König, 2024) and the artist monograph Unknown Ideals (Sternberg Press and Haus für Medienkunst Oldenburg, 2021). With Melody Jue and Jennifer Rhee, he is co-editor of Informatics of Domination (Duke University Press, 2025).

Blas is an Associate Professor of Visual Studies in the Daniels Faculty and the Cinema Studies Institute at the University of Toronto.