In the Bee Archives or Stories from the Drying Room the city honeybees are the main performers.
The sonification of the bees' actions creates in real time a subtle soundtrack for the life in the hive.
An OpenStructure observation hive illustrates values as community building and collective decision making among the bees.
A work by Annemie Maes, Gert Aertsen and Vincent Malstaf.
Within the Time Inventors’ Kabinet project, Annemie Maes takes a closer look at the city honeybee colonies. As an observer at the flighthole of the hive, she collects data on the passage of time in relation to the colonies’ behaviour in urban surroundings.
The bee monitoring project, located in the open air laboratoria of our urban rooftop gardens, offers the opportunity to study the bee colonies as bio-indicators, and scientific hypotheses are thus translated into artistic audio-visual mappings.
For the TIK the festival, Annemie will develop an OpenStructures Book Beehive which will be enhanced with different sensors and audio technology. The bees become the realtime performers on the stage of their hive, the sonification of their actions writes the soundtrack for an exciting visual play that illustrates the values of collective decision making.
bio
annemie_maes, media artist and activist, holds a masters degree in fine arts and cultural studies. Her artistic research and cultural activism projects are publicly presented as politics of change with a focus on actual topics as ecology and womenempowerment. Most of the projects are linked to the problematization of new art in the public space, from a socio-cultural background. Annemie Maes is co-founder of okno, an artist-run organisation working with art media, ecology and technology.
http://opengreens.net
I am a collector of the passage of time, and in the context of the TIK project, I want to delve deeper into the relation of (city)honeybees and time. The following wiki-pages give a survey of the evolution of the personal research I've made concerning bee/time related topics, and it documents also the (technological) research we've developed in group at OKNO.
The Bee Monitoring Project offers the opportunity to relocate the bee colony and its real biotic and abiotic environment to collect data - by the aid of which scientific hypotheses are visualized in an artistic audio-visual mapping. Thus we try to link the the bees' biological clock to the TIKTAK time (and server).
Research in the OpenGreens
Our 2 rooftop gardens host 10 beehives, and soon there will be a 11th one. In summer the gardens are the home of aproximately 500.000 city honeybees. The Bee Monitoring project transforms the 2 rooftop gardens, which are located at about half a kilometer distance from each other, into communicating vessels.
The hives in each of the gardens are populated with Apis Mellifera Carnica. The 2 rooftop gardens are linked by the bees’ overlapping foraging territories and flightroutes. The bees bridge the spatial distance between the gardens, and they link the locations with foraging flights in their individual but also overlapping territories.
Since each colony is active in a radius of more or less 3 km from their housing hive, the respective trajectories, areas of floral visits and individual territories overlap and as such an interference of the gardens takes place.
Honeybees are a good bio-indicators. Biological indicators are species that are used to monitor the health of their ecosystem.
Bioindicators can tell us about the cumulative effects of different pollutants in the ecosystem. The honeybees are generally doing well in the city. City honeybees have more food diversity …. and less problems with pesticides and monocultures.
We experiment with different kinds of beehives, and we also build our own observation hives. These experimental hives give the bees more freedom and it'are experiments in more sustainable beekeeping.
We try to understand the distributed intelligence of social insects : their behaviour, ecology and sociobiology. By monitoring the bees and beehives with all kinds of sensors, we study the colony as a community.
We document our research with all kind of media and in a last phase we will use the extracted data to make artworks based upon the bees' behaviour over time.
We also monitor the interaction between the different colonies and compare the results.
http://padma.okno.be/find?l=L6 ⇒ category Connected OpenGreens