2006 - 2007

Commissioned by The Philosophy of Water Project at the Environmental Education, Science and Technology Building, University of North Texas, Denton. Supported by a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. Curated by Diana Block.
A collaboration with Dr Irene Klaver, Professor of Environmental Philosophy and Cultural Studies, and Dr James Kennedy, Regent Professor of Biological Sciences and Ecotoxicology, at UNT Denton.

“Don’t fight forces. Use them”

- Buckminster Fuller

The Institute for Higher Listening is a moving platform for the exchange of ideas. It takes a different form every time it changes location. It uses methods of propaganda, advertising and scientific research to magnify the crossing points of biological evolution, human history, and entropy.

I established a temporary office at the Environmental Education, Science and Technology Building (EESAT) during a three-month residency at the University of North Texas in Denton. This allowed me to have close interactions with scientists focusing on all aspects of water - water toxicologists, hydro-geologists, biologists and philosophers of water.

I joined Dr James Kennedy and his team of graduate students in their field studies between the runways at Dallas Fort Worth International Airport. The focus of their study was the benthic invertebrates populating the creeks between the runways.

Benthic invertebrates spend all, or part, of their life cycle in or on the bottom sediments of rivers, streams, and lakes. They are very efficient eaters of dead organisms and detritus that accumulate in such ecosystems.

The Denton scientists have discovered that certain species of tiny crustaceans living in the creeks have started making use of stray golf balls from a nearby golf course - turning the rotting balls into ‘pre- fabricated’ environments for habitation.

My office functioned, in the words of curator Regine Basha, “as a receiver, or an antenna, ambiguously slipped within the nexus of various scientific specialties”.*

*Regine Basha, ‘Observation, Absorption, Notation, Action’, in Daniel Bozhkov Recent Works, 2006, p60.