TNT Talk – Joint Research Centre Ispra, Italy (21/06/17)

Talk by AnneMarie Maes [Brussels Urban Bee laboratory] at the Joint Research Centre of the European Commission as part of the TNT (Thinkers ‘n’ Tinkers) Talks series of seminars.

Intelligent and Open Source Beehives, non-intrusive bee monitoring.
Bee colonies are threatened in all industrialized nations.
Given that the survival of bees is crucial for human sustainability, there is a great urgency to improve by all means the ways in which colonies could thrive.
In 2009 I founded the Brussels Urban Bee laboratory, the place of action for a group of artists, scientists and technologists to observe bee colonies in non intrusive set-ups. We monitor the bees in their roles as pollinators and caretakers of biodiversity, and we study their relation to the urban environment as an element for the resilience of our ecosystem. The Urban Bee Lab is also a vehicle to raise public awareness via community platforms, art installations and workshops. 

bio
AnneMarie Maes (be) is an artist and a researcher. Her work includes sculpture, photography, video, installation and public participation. Her research practice combines art and science with a strong interest for DIY technologies. Many of her installations and long term projects (such as the Beehives Project, Urban Corridors or the Laboratory for Form and Matter) use biological, digital and traditional media, including live organisms, and they have been exhibited worldwide. She uses technological mediation to search for new forms of communication with the natural world, to make the invisible visible. 

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