Daniel Bozhkov, Resident Artist Lecture 2024

Interdisciplinary artist and professor Daniel Bozhkov gives a lecture at Skowhegan where he talks about his vast interdisciplinary and pedagogical practice. Bozhkov’s work has always been rooted in collaboration, especially collaborating across a wide range of disciplines: science, physics, mathematics, ecology, music, carpentry, just to name a few. During his lecture, Bozhkov specifically talks about his collaboration with Dr Alu in Austin Texas: where they explored meta materials to learn what make objects partially invisible, and most recently how he has focused his research on creating a circulator of acoustic waves that challenges the theoretical symmetry of the physical laws under time reversal transformation. Bozhkov talks about how interdisciplinary collaborations allow him to sustain his curiosity about the world, and specifically about universities. For Bozhkov, the university is a very special place of gathered expertise and knowledge, but also how one can be in university but not of the university, how is it possible to parasite over systems that were originally created as very racist structures, and how one can utilize something that is already organized and too rigid. Bozhkov continues to speak about collaborative research in his lecture, and how it helps him arrive at ideas that can turn into a type of materialization so one can palpably grasp or experience it in a variety of ways, even if some of those ways are negative. Bozhkov states that the artist is a very unusual type of figure within the culture at large: both almost useless and irrelevant and at the same time– to the people who pay attention– perhaps the only hope for the current state of the world. For Bozhkov, being an artist allows him the ability to shape shift as a natural instinct and face the world and do so accordingly. This allows Bozhkov to be aware of a deep, embodied knowledge of the world’s surroundings and to examine the hyper specificities of the situation he is in. Bozhkov ends his lecture by urging the participants to reflect on three thoughts; the first is that the people who are truly smart and interested in what they do also need to collaborate and work with artists, the second is that philosophy is not wisdom, but it’s the love of wisdom when one is looking for something, and the third is to think about care: how care can extend the scale of what we are doing which doesn’t always been bigger, but maybe smaller as well, for the more one can see care, the more they can connect to it and extract knowledge from it.