The Intelligent Guerilla Beehive is a research project on the edge of art and science. It evokes issues of sustainability and biodiversity, giving viewers an artistic experience of my ongoing research related to the disappearance of the honeybee.
The goal of the Intelligent Beehive is a double one. At one hand it offers a safe refuge for city honeybees, and at the other hand is is a biosensor that interacts with the environment and that measures the pollution of the foraging fields around the beehive.
The project is a collaboration with the non-human other. Honeybees and bacteria become interfaces to be informed about the health status of our environment. Bees and bacteria become living monitoring technology.
My research navigates between experimental urban horticulture, scientific research, and metabolic sculptures. My experiments connect living, intelligent systems and biotechnology with artistic and technological prototyping and experimentation.
My toolset includes microbial life and material science, as well as various measurement and information technologies such as scanning electron microscopes (SEM), sensors, Big Data cloud storage, signal processing, and Artificial Intelligence.
The artworks that result follow a complex work-methodology combining first-hand observation in research gardens and rooftop apiaries, laboratory probes, and digital monitoring.
My work not only gives rise to fascinating images, useful ecological data and new ideas for building sustainable beehives. It is also a political statement, arguing for the integration of nature as a social/sensory/phenomenal living matrix.
This matrix takes shape in collaboration with bees and their urban foraging. The resulting theory and practice emphasizes fairness to nature.
Specifically, it draws attention to the fragile affinities between humans, bees, bacteria, and the urban neighborhoods they symbiotically inhabit.
