Industrial listening includes the use of geophones and dowsing rods. Geophone arrays embedded at the earth’s surface connect to thumper trucks that “listen and reflect” acoustic waves in geological strata by inducing earthquakes.

Despite the promises of accuracy, drilling companies still commission dowsers to wildcat (prospect for – sound) oil, minerals, or water underground, urging questions of the credibility and aims of industrial research when in service to extraction. Mineral dowsing generally uses pendulums over topographical maps, while water dowsing uses coat hangers, witch hazel sticks or copper rods.

Percussive gestures with a geophone on a floor loom play with technorational forms of listening. And recorded household objects as divining pendulums over a fraudulent blueprint of Texas oilfields (1920s).

Fraudulent oil maps meant to deter drilling competition from landgrabbing, or to convince owners to sell, amid ongoing dispossession of black and indigenous lands. Divining over the map points to the dreamy indifference of wind and the uncertainties of tapping or untangling in acts of measurement.

A delicate empiricism consists of knowing the difference between vibrating, trembling, shaking. And the errancy and multiplicity of listening.