develops cradle to cradle monitoring beehives in order to experience the amazing world of bees and to sense the hidden structure and health of our urban environment through the activity of bees.
The transparent beehive shown in this exhibition is part of a series of ecological instrumented beehives building up towards a fully biocompatible intelligent beehive.
This beehive internally has the structure of a book. Bees build honeycomb structures on each page of the book. The hive is enhanced with microphones which pick up the vibrations and sounds of the hive which are sonified and made audible. Cameras inside the hive monitor the growth of the wax structures and the activity in the colony. Additional sensors measure temperature, humidity, and other microclimate measures.
The hive housed a live colony and was shown in situ during the TIK festival of OKNO in 2013 in Brussels. The colony collapsed due to the aggressive invasion of the waxmoth in 2014.
New media artist Annemarie Maes is the founding director of the Brussels Urban Bee Lab. She has for decades been a recognized leader pioneering art-science projects in Belgium, using highly original ways to bring out hidden structures in nature by constructing original technological methods to probe the living world and by translating that in artistic creations through sonification, visualization, sculptures, large-scale long-term installations, and workshops. She thus makes use of technological mediation to search for new forms of communication with the natural world.
In 2007 Annemie Maes co-founded the artist collective OKNO which has been active on the border between new media and ecology. OKNO uses DIY and collective artist practices to find new ways to engage with the urban environment. In 2009 she founded the Brussels Urban Bee Lab as a spin-off from OKNO. It focuses on urban bee colonies as a vehicle for novel artistic practices to raise ecological awareness. Following her personal experiences with urban agriculture and ecological activism, AnneMarie Maes approaches plants as individuals interacting with bees, and the presence of the technology as a social reality.
More information on the BEE-research is available browsing the BEE Notebooks and downloading the Foraging Fields booklet.