This page gives an overview of all presentations related to the Politics of Change project. It makes no distinction between media. A presentation can be a participation in a festival, in an exhibition, a workshop, a walk, a talk, …
Complete archive of publications, papers, exhibition catalogues and media coverage.
The contributions to this archive can be selected in the sub-menus for a faster search.
Textile works and installations are an inherent part of the visual arts today.
In researching works with new, often biological, materials, much research
work can still be done within this discipline.
In my work, I bring together different lines of thought within which textiles
and textile techniques can be seen as mediums and signifiers.
2020_PORTFOLIO: research, photographs, objects and installations
1. Bee Agency
2. Sensorial Skin
3. Connected Open Greens
4. Laboratorium for Form and Matter
My work is a tight coupling between research and art. It meanders on the edge of biology, ecology and technology. My artistic research is materialized in techno-organic objects that are inspired by factual/fictional stories; in artifacts that are a combination of digital fabrica- tion and craftsmanship; in installations that reflect both the problem and the (possible) solu- tion, in multispecies collaborations, in polymorphic forms and models created by eco-data.
ZWERMSTOF: INSTALLATIE & PERFORMANCES
'Zwermstof' is een multimediale installatie die op meerdere momenten geactiveerd wordt via performances. Het project start met de performance tijdens de Berlin Art Week in september, en de installatie is geprogrammeerd tot eind november 2024.
Het duitse collectief PARA nodigt Anne Marie Maes uit om een project te ontwikkelen voor de transdisciplinaire tentoonstelling ‘Orangerie der Fürsorge’
Organic Perceptions
“Gemme la Natura perfin nella tomba, e il suo gemito vince il silenzio e l’oscurità
della morte.”, thus laments Ugo Foscolo at the thought of the transience of life and its
fatalities, which bring the extinction of the body, that perishes and tends to be annihilated by the sheer force of nature. Nature watches with an impassible eye the misfortunes and wanderings of the ontological mind enclosed in a material body that asserts his fulness of life in a short span of time, encapsulated in a clepsydra, that counts irrevocably, inexpugnably the temporal passage.
Alchimia Nova. Avant Propos. Anne Marie Maes est une artiste que l'on peut rattacher au genre art et science. Elle développe depuis de nombreuses années un travail qui s'appuie sur la recherche scientifique, la biologie, l'étude des micro-organismes d'une part, les sciences numériques et la passion du jardinage d'autre part. Dans son jardin à Bruxelles, elle cultive les plantes qui lui servent de matière première pour ses expérimentations, elle installe aussi les ruches qui lui permettent d'étudier le comportement des abeilles.
New Alchemy by Anne Marie Maes: The need to cultivate our Garden. Artist and beekeeper Anne Marie Maes, fascinated by bees for more than two decades, deals with the close interaction and coevolution between these insects and urban ecosystems through artistic research practices and in collaboration with scientists and engineers. Her projects involve complex relationships between living organisms and objects manufactured with biotechnology within the «postdigital paradigm», in a world where technology is completely intertwined with all facets of our existence.
Pairs Work Better than Singles. In 2008, AnneMarie Maes and her collaborators installed several hives on the rooftop of Okno (Russian for ‘window’), an artist-run space in an old industrial flour mill on the west side of the Brussels canal. A year later, she installed two more hives 400m due east on the roof adjacent her studio. Urban beekeeping had not been practised since the 1950s, so potential beekeepers faced huge learning curves. Her primary focus was to observe the bees to see whether they might meet up with bees inhabiting Okno’s rooftop garden.
BioIntelligent Beehive as Architectural Data. For most of the past decade, Annemarie Maes has been growing, hacking, digitizing, building, and thinking about beehives — particularly those in urban areas. Her constructed, prototyped, and grown hives are not immediately recognizable in classic forms of basket or wooden-box apiaries. Collaborating with a team of biologists, she is reconceptualizing what a beehive is and what it can be. Through the beehive she is addressing urban ecology, politics, and social systems. In this sense, what she builds or grows is recognizable as belonging to the realm of biological growths, found in nature and culture, and known in theory as animal, extended phenotypes.
On Growth and Form. AnneMarie Maes is fascinated in the processes by which Nature creates form: how bees create honeycombs in the hive, how they self-organize into swarms, how plants grow and form geometric patterns, or how bacteria and yeast collectively create material surfaces forming biofabrics. She observes and analyzes these processes, isolates them, or causes them to appear in artificial conditions , and then creates art works from this artistic research in many different media.
Il faut cultiver notre jardin …
On the need for gardening
To approach the work of AnneMarie Maes, an artist working with art-science projects that evolve around nature and ecology, it seems apt to use notions of ‘lines of flight’ (Deleuze) or ‘knots’ (Ingold), alluding to respectively the bees and the rhizomatic growth of her garden, but equally to the new networks she continually ads and develops.
Another Kind of Paradigm: Art as Practice, Art as Research.
The Brussels based artist AnneMarie Maes has created an ecosystem in front of her apartment on the rooftop of a parking garage, with several hundred square meters filled with vegetables, salads, herbs, bushes, small trees and other plants grown in wooden containers, and also including several so called “intelligent beehives.”
Politics of Green Spaces. Contemporary art practices that investigate the role of urban political economy and private-public property relations in the social production of green spaces, we may classify under the umbrella of the Politics of Green Spaces. Such art practices do 'not just create a new aesthetics' but literally get 'involved in patterns of social, scientific, and technological transformations'.
title: The Art + Science + Policy Nexus ; editor: Kat Austen ; author: Kat Austen; distribution: Joint Research Center Ispra (JRC) / EU
How do cutting edge art-science initiatives intersect with policy? This scoping study surveys the landscape of the art-science-policy network, focussing on how and when art-science projects interact with policy and policymakers. What emerges is a diversity of channels by which learning and ideas from art-science make their way to policy
title: Alchimia Nova - De l’emergència de conrear el nostre Jardí; editor: Àngels Viladomiu Canela ; author: Àngels Viladomiu Canela; distribution: Universitat de Barcelona, Facultat de Belles Arts, Departament d’Arts visuals i Disseny, 08028 Barcelona, Catalunya, Espanya
Resum:
L’artista i apicultora AnneMarie Maes, fascinada per les abelles des de fa més de dues dècades, tracta l’estreta interacció i coevolució entre aquests insectes i els ecosistemes urbans, mitjançant pràctiques d’investigació artística, en col·laboració amb científics i enginyers.
title: Dialectics of Nature: Metabolic Architectures meet Intelligent Guerrilla Beehives; editor: Leonardo ; authors: Dennis Dollens, AnneMarie Maes; distribution: MIT press, Leonardo Magazine Vol.53 No.5; DOI 10.1162/leon_a_01770
Leonardo: https://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/abs/10.1162/leon_a_01770
Between realms of cellular life, city occupation and technology, AnneMarie Maes’s Intelligent Guerrilla Beehive project and Dennis Dollens’s metabolic architectures share a theoretical lineage and form-finding curiosity, subscribing to the vie...
title: Sensorial Skin, Report of the residency; editor: AnneMarie Maes ; curators: Hybrid Forms Lab, STARTS residencies; images: AnneMarie Maes; distribution: Starts.eu
The artwork L’Origine du Monde’ shows a strongly enlarged bacterial chain made from glass cells and filled with colonies of cyanobacteria carrying out live real-time photosynthesis. Cyanobacteria are photosynthetic bacteria that live in moist soil and water, often in a symbiotic relationship with plants or lichen.
The glass cells for the artwork have been specially produced by glassblowers in Venice. Different strains of cyanobacteria have been cultured at the Hybrid Forms Lab, which is specialised in photosynthesis.
title: The Intelligent Beehive and the Genesis of a Microbial Skin; editor: Aalto University ; authors: Anne Marie Maes; distribution: RIXC, Acoustic Space (Vol. 20) / Renewable Futures (Issue 5); DOI
For most of the past decade I have been growing, hacking, digitizing, building, and thinking
about beehives - particularly those in urban areas. Collaborating with a team of biologists, I
am reconceptualizing what a beehive is and what it can be. The bio-art project The
Intelligent Beehive monitors the behaviour of urban honeybee colonies as a source of
inspiration for ongoing artistic research into issues of ecological, architectural and social
sustainability in urban environments.
title: The Intelligent Guerrilla Beehive; Editor: Dr. Malu Fragoso; authors: AnneMarie Maes; distribution: NanoLab, Federal University of Rio de Janeiro; ISBN: /
The Intelligent Guerrilla 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 beeh...
editors: Dennis Dollens; authors: Dennis Dollens; title: BioIntelligent Beehive as Architectural Data; distribution: autopoietix.blog.it; ISBN:
I came to Maes’s work because her experiments connect living, intelligent systems and technology/biosciences with social (colony/urbanism) architectural and technological prototyping and experimentation. Her work illustrates radical and necessary ecological searches for sharing urban life. Equally, her toolset and research trajectory
authors: CS-DC e-laboratory members (Masatoshi Funabashi, Peter Hanappe, Takashi Isozaki, AnneMarie Maes, Takahiro Sasaki, Kaoru Yoshida) title: Open Systems Exploration for Ecosystems Leveraging, article for CS-DC e-laboratory, Springer publication
Abstract. We established a Complex Systems Digital Campus e-laboratory “Open Systems Exploration for Ecosystems Leveraging” in view of re- designing sustainable social-ecological systems related to food produc- tion ranging in food, health, community, economy, and environment. 6 initial projects have been set up, namely Synecoculture, P2P Food Lab, Open Systems Data Analytics, The Bee Laboratory, Open Systems Sim- ulation and One-Health Food Lab.
author: AnneMarie Maes, title: The Sound Beehive Experiment, article for IGNORANCE, the publication of the ALOTOF project, Brussels - april 2015, ISBN 9789491775987
The Sound Beehive Experiment
The Sound Beehive Experiment monitors the development of a bee colony on the basis of the sounds it generates. For this purpose, we developed a beehive that is equipped with sensors, microphones and cameras. We made sure that this equipment is not hindering the bees in their daily action. The Sound Beehive is installed in our field laboratory on a rooftop in the Brussels city centre.
Fig. 7. Diagram of the technical architecture of the Sound Beehive.
The...
author: AnneMarie Maes, title: The Scaffolding Sound Beehive, paper for the A.I. and Art section in the International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, Proceedings of IJCAI-2015, Buenos Aires (july 2015)
The Scaffolded Sound Beehive is an immersive multi-media installation which provides viewers an artistic visual and audio experience of activities in a beehive. Data were recorded in urban beehives and processed using sophisticated pattern recognition, AI technologies, and sonification and com- puter graphics software. The installation includes an experiment in using Deep Learning to interpret the activities in the hive based on sound and micro-climate...
authors: Peter Hanappe, Rob Dunlop, Luc Steels, Nicolas Duval, AnneMarie Maes title: Agroecology: A Fertile Field for Human Computation, Human Computation publication
abstract:
Human Computation may be the best approach for the monitoring/analysis/management of agroe- cological food production systems. This is the preliminary conclusion we have reached in the P2P Food Lab experiments.
title: Alchimia Nova; start year: 16 Feb.2023; end year: 30 April 2023; curator: Sandrine Wymann ; artist: Anne Marie Maes ; production: Kunsthalle, Mulhouse
Anne Marie Maes est une artiste que l’on peut rattacher au genre art et science. Elle développe depuis de nombreuses années un travail qui s’appuie sur la recherche scientifique, la biologie, l’étude des micro- organismes d’une part, les sciences numériques et la passion du jardinage d’autre part.
title: Abstracte Kunst bestaat niet; start year: 2021; end year: 2022; editor: Frank Maes ; curator: Frank Maes; artists: ; distribution: Emergent, Veurne
In deze groepstentoonstelling presenteren we kunst die zich verhoudt tot de vele abstracties die onze levens beheersen. En dat terwijl het onmogelijk is om een abstract kunstwerk te maken.
title: Woven by Nature Catalogue; editor: AnneMarie Maes ; curator: Camilla Colombo; images: the artist; distribution: iMAL Brussels
In an era where anthropocentrism defines more than ever the relationship we as humans build with nature, shifting the centre of attention can become a revolutionary act.
Sensorial Skins presents investigations into the sculptural potential of organic materials. AnneMarie Maes transforms them into fabrics, membranes and biofilms. She thus creates complex surfaces that arouse our senses through their materiality, their texture, their colours and smells.
title: Grey Area - Siva Zona: Discourses editor: Darko Fritz ; authors: Irena Bekić, Marija Borovičkić, Sarah Cook, Bronaċ Ferran, Darko Fritz, Sonja Leboš, Tonka Maleković, Ivana Meštrov, Manja Ristić, Sani Sardelić, Jadranka Vinterhalter, Lea Vene; Publisher:grey) (area – space for contemporary and media art
Grey) (area – space for contemporary and media art was inaugurated in Korčula in summer 2006 upon the initiative by the artist, designer, and curator Darko Fritz from Zagreb. In 2009 grey) (area was formally registered as a non-governmental organization and today it has nine members. Sonja Leboš joined in 2013 as project manager.
title: Un/Green Festival Catalogue; editor: RIXC ; curators: Jens Hauser, Rasa Smite, Raitis Smits; images: the artists; distribution: Rixc Center for New Media
The 2019 RIXC Festival aims at complicating the pervasively employed notion of ‘green’ by providing a cross-disciplinary platform for discussions and artistic inter- ventions exploring one of the most paradoxical and broadest topics of our times. The festival features the UN/GREEN exhibition at the Latvian National Museum of Art, and the 4th Open Fields conference that aims to ‘un-green’ greenness, eco-systemically reconnect post-human postures, and discover and unpack 'Naturally Artificial Intelligences'.
The exhibition Eco-Visionaries is dedicated to the topic of ecological change and presents artistic responses to current challenges.
How are new media, technologies and technology-scientific methods used in the arts to draw attention to pressing ecological issues? What visionary projects and ideas are emerging to tackle climate change, food shortage and resource depletion? Which solutions are worth pursuing?
title: Academie Berichten; Leve[n]de Kunst; editor: Jan Albert ; curators: Jonas Lescrauwaet; images: Jonas Lescrauwaet; distribution: KVAB
Wanneer kunst, wetenschap, design en technologie hun krachten bundelen, komen ze tot prikkelende en wederzijdse inzichten. De beelden, gedachten en producten die eruit voortkomen verruimen zowel de kennis, de verbeelding als de toekomstperspectieven. Leve[n]de Kunst: ontmoeting tussen kunst, design en (micro)bio(techno)logie.
title: Intelligent Beehives as predicates for Metabolic Architectures; editor: Stadtkuratorin Hamburg Maschine ; authors: Dennis Dollens; images: AnneMarie Maes; distribution: Hamburg City Council
Theory-driven architecture may be organized to encode and set procedures for research-by-design seeking data from prototyping as an extension of art. Through art, a research scaffold may emerge for exploratory architectural experimentation and discussion. Associatively, interlinked sets of observational data, sensor readings, laboratory tests, environmental analysis, and fablab models permit potential hybrid materials to embed data for exchange between science, design, and urban sites.
title: Brussels in SongEun: Imagining Cities beyond Technology 2.0; Editor: Gluon/SongEun ArtSpace; authors: the Artists, Ramona Van Gansbeke, Pooluna Chung, Min YoungLee; distribution: Gluon/SongEun ArtSpace; ISBN:
Technology has been a crucial element in preparing cities for a turbulent future. This is why Brussels in SongEun: Imagining Cities beyond Technology 2.0 engages in a socio-political discourse that involves contemporary visual artists in facing this issue -the question of what constitutes a desirable 'intelligent' city in a time of technological revolution?
title: For a Brave New Brussels; Editor: Gluon; authors: Paul Dujardin, Christophe Dejaegher, Stéphanie Pécourt; distribution: Gluon; ISBN:
For a Brave New Brussels (Maat, Lisbon Oct/Nov 2018) is an exhibition and discussion platform that stimulates the discourse around ‘Smart Cities’. Since its early days, the application of new digital technologies to urban spaces and pro- cesses has been celebrated for its ability to increase the well-being of citizens, but this engagement has mostly been limited to a technocratic focus on energy systems, mobility and building efficiency. It has privileged ...
Between May and June 2018, the prestigious Aalto University hosted the “Hybrid Labs Symposium 2018”. For several years, design, digital media, audio-visual representation methods, architecture, emerging technologies and urban planning have been an integral part of Aalto University’s agenda, incorporating experimental research. These fields contribute to an interdisciplinary debate starting from the hybrid, which is understood as an actual state in which everything can be recognised: languages, academic disciplines, professions and life itself.
editors: Gemma Gallardo; authors: Martina Millà, Andrea Valdés and the artists; title: Where are the bees? ;distribution: Fundació Juan Miró; ISBN: 978 84 16411 42 9
Beehave explores the right of honey bees to inhabit urban spaces, the coexistence of the city's desired and necessary biodiversity with the artificial elements of the urban landscape.
editors Stéphanie Pécourt: ; authors: Stéphanie Pécourt, Juliette Bibasse; title: Nova XX; distribution: Culture et Patrimoine, Halles St.Géry; ISBN:
A forum dedicated to innovation by women in technology, science and art at the dawn of the fourth industrial revolution / 4.0. The first edition of Nova XX will happen in Brussels from 9th to 30th December 2017. The main events include an exhibition of 9 installations by artists from Brussels and elsewhere in Europe, as well as
editors: Bozar, Halles St.Gery; authors: the curators; title: BEAF2017, Bozar Electronic Arts Festival; distribution: Bozar; ISBN:
The Tendencies exhibition unites contrasting narratives of some of the most interesting and intriguing voices in Belgian arts. Tendencies presents artworks that ‘use’ or ‘comment upon’ the latest evolutions in science and technology. Tendencies puts emphasis on works which question scientific and technological innovations as much as they incorporate them.
author: AnneMarie Maes, title: Foraging Fields Catalogue, published at the occasion of the exhibition FIELDS (2014)
Catalogue accompanying the installation Foraging Fields which is developed for the exhibition FIELDS - curated by Rasa Smite and Raitis Smits (Rixc) and Armin Medosch. The FIELDS exhibition is one of the major exhibitions of Riga– European Cultural Capital 2014. It runs from 15/5/2014 to 4/8/2014 at the Arsenals Exhibition Hall of the Latvian National Arts Museum. The landmark exhibition shows approximately 40 artworks by international artists focusing on art/science interactions and ecological issues.
Annemie Maes studies the co-evolution b...
author: Basak Senova, title: Scientific inquiries, published at the occasion of the exhibition SCIENTIFIC INQUIRIES (2013), ISBN
Seven research-based artists were invited to Koç University to meet with researchers from various fields to develop artistic projects which are engaged with the outstanding researches that are being conducted in the university. At first, huge amount of researches were presented by Koç University to the artists and the curator, then, 33 researchers, whose researches are in synch with the artists’ area of interest, were selected by the curator. After attending a set of meetings both with the curator and the researchers in a period of ...
author: Luc Steels, title: Creating Ecological Corridors in Cities, published in: the Transparent Beehive Notebook (2013) - ISBN 9789081898515
AnneMarie Maes is representative of a new wave of artists for which art is life and life is ecological.
This direction of work is of course not entirely new. It is the visionary 20th century artist Joseph Beuys who already in the nineteen sixties showed the need for a radically different kind of art. He argued forcefully against the wasteful use of natural resources and in favor of a social humanitarianism that tries to connect individuals back to their communities and to the ecosystems on which human life depends....
title: Matter of Kinship; editors: Elsa Garcia, Oliver Leistert ; authors: Anne Marie Maes, Jonathan Minchin, Luc Steels, Teresa de Albuquerque, Alvaro Garcia de Zúniga ; distribution: Stolen Book Portugal; ISBN: 978-989-35589-0-4
This publication -a visual essay- is one of the outcomes of Anne Marie Maes' residency at the Casa de Mateus Foundation. It complements the exhibition 'Matter of Kinship' / 'Matéria de Afinidades'.
Artist Anne Marie Maes installed her mobile studio on the grounds of Casa de Mateus. She carefully observed the different ecologies and responded with interventions to the specific aspects of the vast domain. With her work, she subtly introduces angles that show the site from a new perspective.
title: Hamburg Machine Revisited; editors: Isabella Kohlhuber, Oliver Leistert ; authors: Érik Bordeleau, Michael Dudeck, John Gerrard, Christian Huck, Francis Hunger, Nina Kalenbach, Oliver Leistert, Isabell Lorey, AnneMarie Maes, Britta Peters, Martina Raponi, Marius Skroče, Sue Spaid, Axel Stockburger, The Silent University (Abimbola Ayodele, Salah Zater), Kathrin Wildner, Inga Wellmann.; distribution: Adocs Verlag Hamburg; ISBN: 978-3-943253-40-5
In its second term from 2018 to 2020 with the title HAMBURG MASCHINE, the urban initiative project "Stadtkuratorin Hamburg" revolved around the theme of digitality in the context of art in the public sphere. This publication documents, updates, and expands the program developed and curated by Dirck Möllmann.
title: Hiperorganicos - Reconexoes ancestrofuturistas; Editor: Carlos Augusto M. da Nóbrega, Fabiane M. Borges, Maria Luiza P.G. Fragoso; authors: distribution: Rio Books, Rio de Janeiro; ISBN 978-85-9497-055-8/
Este livro é um projeto editorial resultante das atividades de pesquisas realizadas no NANO – Núcleo de Arte e Novos Organismos / EBA-UFRJ, laboratório criado em 2010 pelo artista-pesquisador Carlos Augusto (Guto) M. da Nóbrega, coordenado desde então junto com a também artista-pesquisadora Maria Luiza (Malu) P. G. Fragoso. O laboratório NANO atua no âmbito da graduação, e do Programa de Pós-Graduação em Artes Visuais, da Escola de Belas Artes, na Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro.
The exhibition Eco-Visionaries is dedicated to the topic of ecological change and presents artistic responses to current challenges.
How are new media, technologies and technology-scientific methods used in the arts to draw attention to pressing ecological issues? What visionary projects and ideas are emerging to tackle climate change, food shortage and resource depletion? Which solutions are worth pursuing?
editors: Fundació Juan Miró, Barcelona; authors: Martina Millà, Xavier Theros, Domenic Leo, Jorid Bosch, Jaume Cambra, Anna Febrero; title: Bee Writings ;distribution: Miró Foundation ; ISBN: 9788416411 40 5
One could say that ever since Joseph Beuys adapted the theses of Rudolf Steiner, the author of a series of famous lectures about bees, the importance and symbolism of these insects has been widely examined by contemporary artists.
editors: Adriaan Eeckels; authors: A. Eeckels et al.; title: Fair/Fear. Resonances II.; distribution: Publication Office of the European Union; ISBN: 978-92-79-71773-4
Can artists collaborate with scientists and policy makers? That is the question the European Comission's Science and Knowledge Service, the Joint Research Centre or JRC, put itself. The JRC wanted to understand if the rapprochement between art and science of the last decades could help it to adapt to changing times, to refine its policies and reach out to the public.
editors: Sue Spaid; authors: Sue Spaid; title: Ecovention Europe. Art to transform ecologies 1957-2017; distribution: Museum De Domeinen, Sittard; ISBN: 9-789075-883565
This section introduces ecoventions as a subset of land art, presents
a succinct chronology of the past 60 years of ecological events in Europe and describes the global art scene that inspired the 2002 exhi- bition “Ecovention: Current Art to Transform Ecologies,” as well as what transpired afterwards.
editors: Jutta Schmiederer; authors: the artists, the curators; title: CyberArts 2017; distribution: Hatje Cantz Verlag; ISBN: 978-3-7757-4336-5
The CyberArts exhibition at the OK Center for Contemporary Art (Sept.7-Sept17, 2017) features the best works singled out for recognition by the 2017 Prix Ars Electronica. The world’s most coveted prize honoring creativity and pioneering spirit in media art has been awarded annually since 1987.
editors: Rasa Smite, Raitis Smits, Armin Medosch; authors: many, p171 AnneMarie Maes, the Soundbeehive Experiment; title: RENEWABLE FUTURES. Art, Science and Society in the Post-Media Age; distribution: RIXC, ISBN: 978-9934-8434-6-4
With this Renewable Futures volume, we begin a new series of Acoustic Space, that will focus on exploring the transformative potential of art in the post-media age. Our book presents the research and practices that aim to invent new avenues for more sustainable and imaginative future developments. The papers from the 1st Renewable Futures Conference selected in this volume are aimed at shaping new contact zones between traditionally separated domains – art and science, academic research and independent creative practices, sustainable businesses and social engagement in the 21st century.
The book, an art book on food, is based on material gathered during RESONANCES I, an ad hoc project organized by the Joint Research Center of the European Commission at the occasion of the Universal Exhibition EXPO 2015: Feeding the Planet, Energy for Life.
The material has been deconstructed and reconstructed into a new narrative that evokes the need of considering food not only as a mere scientific, technical and commercial matter of fact but also as a social, cultural and political matter of concern.
AnneMarie Maes is a multi-media artist who has been studying the tight interactions and co-evolutions within urban ecosystems. In the open-air lab on the rooftop of her studio, she created an experimental garden and has been keeping bees in self-designed beehives, equipped to bring out hidden structures in the life of the colony. Her “field notes” provide an on-going source of inspiration for her artworks.
author: AnneMarie Maes, editors: AnneMarie Maes, title: the Transparent Beehive Notebook, ISBN 9781364475666
AnneMarie Maes studies the tight interaction between city honeybees and urban ecosystems. Her preoccupations with bees come from a fascination with these amazing insects: the way their bodies look and function, they way they organize their complex societies, and the way they explore their environment.
authors: the artists of the ALOTOF-consortium, editors: Giván Belá and AnneMarie Maes title: IGNORANCE, ISBN 9789491775987
A collection of plans, descriptions of art works, pictures of events, creative texts and drawings, made by an international group of artists about issues in environments and art. The initiative 'A Laboratory on the Open Fields' (ALOTOF) was working outside the general and accepted lines of conventional creativity, trying to investigate new forms and methods for an ecological media art.
author: AnneMarie Maes, title: the Transparent Beehive Notebook, published: 2013, ISBN 9789081898515
The Transparent Beehive Notebook gives an overview of the Transparent Beehive Project. It describes in words and images the intense process of Bee Monitoring and the close collaboration with numerous colleague artists, scientists, engineers and beekeepers. The relation bees and flowers is an evident one and is never far away in this notebook. In an artistic way and starting from hands on experiences as a beekeeper, I give an account of the building of monitoring systems and their implementation in the beehives at the open field labs. Working with the collected...
author: AnneMarie Maes, title: Connected OpenGreens, published: 2011, as documentation and artwork for my contribution to the festival Burning Ice 2011 (Kaaitheater, Brussels) , editor: SO-ON Brussels
This fourth edition of Burning Ice -'It's the economy, stupid!'- will be built up around the theme of economy. Climate change confronts us with the consequences of our actions. It turns our world-view with its endless growth completely upside down. Our civilisation appears to be underpinned by waste, excess and fundamental inequality.
Continuum Cinema : the Vision Machine is een onderzoeksproject naar de productie-, presentatie en perceptie van collaboratieve werken in de hedendaagse kunst.
Cinema moet hier gelezen worden zoals gedefinieerd door Peter Greenaway : “de totale som van alle technologië die ingezet worden ter bevordering van het bewegend beeld : film, computer en digitaal beeld, en structuren als gesproken en geschreven woord, acting, montage, klank en licht.”
Het is een ruim onderzoek, dat gevoerd wordt vanuit de taal van de nieuwe media. Het project onderzoekt het ...
title: Kunstenaars en designers zijn niet vies van schimmels en bacteriën; editor: Hendrik Tratsaert, Pieter Coupé; author: Maarten Buser; distribution: De Lage Landen magazine - n°1/2024
Van ziektemakers tot de vuilnismannen van de natuur: schimmels, bacteriën en algen brengen vele functies en associaties met zich mee. Kunstenaars en designers omarmen steeds vaker de zintuiglijkheid en het duurzame poten tieel van deze eigenzinnige microorganismen. Maak kennis met lichtgevende schimmels en wevende bacteriën.
title: Anne Marie Maes et Alchimia Nova à la Kunsthalle de Mulhouse; editor: Suzi Vieira; author: Suzi Vieir; distribution: Poly magazine, la culture n'a pas de frontières - 31/03/2023
Apicultrice et apprentie biochimiste, la Bruxellloise Anne Marie Maes investit la Kunsthalle de Mulhouse avec ses œuvres organiques, fruits d’une Alchimia nova poétique. Entre laboratoire de folles expériences et savant cabinet de curiosités, Anne Marie Maes a transformé, le temps d’une déroutante exposition, le musée mulhousien en poste privilégié d’observation de la nature, dans toute sa mystérieuse complexité et sa plus fascinante beauté.
title: Exposition "Alchimia Nova" à Mulhouse : fruits de la science et du hasard, les créations d'Anne Marie Maes célèbrent le vivant; editor: Chrystel Chabert; author: Chrystel Chabert; distribution: France Culture - 30/03/2023
A partir d’éléments végétaux et de bactéries, l’artiste belge Anne Marie Maes crée des œuvres où science et art dialoguent de façon surprenante. Le résultat d'un travail mené en collaboration avec une équipe de microbiologistes du CNRS de Strasbourg.
title: Avec Alchimia Nova, Anne Marie Maes explore la matière vivante à Mulhouse; editor: Elisa Chaveneau; author: Elisa Chaveneau; distribution: Makery, le média de tous les labs - 29/03/2023
Anne Maries Maes présente « Alchimia Nova » à la Kunsthalle de Mulhouse jusqu’au 30 avril. Une exposition à ne pas manquer pour les féru(e)s de peaux de kombucha, teintures naturelles, cire d’abeille, lichens et autres colonnes de Winogradski.
title: Anne Marie Maes transforme la Kunsthalle en Laboratoire; editor: Alexandre Parodi; author: Alexandre Parodi; distribution: Mouvement - 03/2023
Apicultrice, herboriste et apprentie biochimiste, Anne Marie Maes traite la nature comme un répertoire de formes infinies. Au fil de ses expériences, elle produit des textures et des matières inédites qu’échantillonne l’exposition Alchimia Nova à la Kunsthalle de Mulhouse.
'Nous sommes contaminés par nos rencontres : elles changent ce que nous sommes pendant que nous ouvrons la voie à d’autres. Comme la contamination modifie les projets de mondes en chantier, des mondes mutuels ainsi que des nouvelles directions peuvent émerger.'
Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, 'Le champignon de la fin du monde'
AnneMarie Maes is a renowned Belgian artist, particularly involved in art/science projects, often participating in fruitful collaborations between scientists and artists, but also with more unusual co-creators such as bees, bacteria, and algae. AnneMarie welcomed us in her Brussels home and showed us her marvelous urban garden, a beacon of lush biodiversity in the middle of the city. We talked about her experience with cultural institutions and the general public in relation to environmentalism and her daring hybridization of techniques, her groundbreaking work with communities (human and non-human ones), and the effectiveness of art as a teaching tool.
___ interview by Valentina Bianchi
title: Kunstenaar-Onderzoeker AnneMarie Maes; editor: De Markten 2021 ; author: Nora Kempeneer; distribution: De Markten
Buren van de Markten - Kunstenaar/Onderzoeker AnneMarie Maes.
AnneMarie Maes bereikt wonderlijk mooie resultaten in haar werk met bacteriën, schimmels, mossen en bijen. In haar daktuin vindt ze alles wat ze hiervoor nodig heeft.
In deze rubriek polsen we waar kunstenaars de mosterd hebben gehaald voor hun (recente) werk. Deze keer vertelt AnneMarie Maes (1955, Leuven) over de Sensorial Skins, tactiele texturen waarvoor ze onder andere bacteriën inzet.
editors: Alicia Hernandez-Dispaux; authors: Alicia Hernandez-Dispaux; title: AnneMarie Maes, rencontre en images; distribution: Online Brussels Magazine; ISBN:
C’est la rencontre de l’art et de la science, un dialogue esthétique inattendu où formes du passé s’entrelacent avec celles du futur. Femme de génie, Anne-Marie Maes réconcilie les antinomies usuelles pour produire un travail infiniment complexe et stupéfiant de poésie ....
editors: Eric Mabille; authors: Eric Mabille; title: Bozar Electronic Arts en quatre expositions 2017; distribution: Boomartstic Brussels Artzine; ISBN:
Tendencies, c’est l’art belge à l’ère numérique en mode féminin, seconde édition. Six artistes-femmes – Alex Verhaest, Stéphanie Roland, Anne-Marie Maes, Claire Wiliams, Katia Lecomte Mirsky et Esther Venrooy réunies sous le commissariat de Stéphanie Pécourt.
editors: Sabine Alexander; authors: Hilde Van Canneyt; title: AnneMarie Maes: Alice in Wonderland; distribution: Kunsttijdschrift Vlaanderen; ISBN:
Al te vaak leeft de idee dat kunst en wetenschap elkaars tegengestelde zijn, dat ze elkaar uitsluiten, maar steeds meer groeit de overtuiging dat de creativiteit en de originaliteit van beide met elkaar verwant zijn. Ook neemt het aantal kunstenaars toe dat wetenschap als uitgangspunt neemt voor de meest uiteenlopende artistieke experimenten: ze maken sculpturen uit lichaamscellen, componeren muziek aan de hand van hersengolven ofontwerpen robotica en informatiesystemen. Voor het publiek is het even wennen.
title: I am fascinated by their behaviour.; editor: http://havibaj.com; interviewer: Balazs Kulcsar; distribution: www.havibaj.com, www.magyarmuhely.hu
- Nowdays the newspapers are filled with the climate change problem. Do you think that, in a thousand years, there will still be humans on earth?
- I think humans are a strong animals (laugh). Big survivors. Better would be if there are less humans on Earth, it would be good to have a balance and restore Nature more or less. For sure, Nature will exist in 1000 years. When I started my rooftop garden on the rooftop of my studio in Brussels (where we discussing now), the first few meters were a terrace.
title: Bijen zijn net ScienceFiction Robots.; editor: redactie GonzoCircus; authors: Maarten Buser; images: AnneMarie Maes; distribution: Virtúmedia
AnneMarie Maes is gefascineerd door bijen. Ze doet artistiek onderzoek naar slimme korven voor de ernstig bedreigde insectensoort. Wetenschap en Kunst moeten niet als los van mekaar gezien worden, benadrukt ze. Inmiddels heeft ze een belangrijke stap gezet richting een bijenkorf die aansluit bij de behoeften van haar bewoners.
editors: Connaissance des Arts; authors: Valérie De Maulmin; title: Le Nouveau Monde d'AnneMarie Maes ;distribution: Connaissance des Arts, Magazine mensuel; ISBN:
« Il faut cultiver son jardin » : tel pour- rait être le premier axiome d’AnneMarie Maes, artiste plurimédia et authentique chercheuse scientifique, adepte de l’urban gardening, qui a conçu un jardin de 750 m2 sur son toit, en plein centre de Bruxelles. « Mon jardin, c’est mon laboratoire opéra- tionnel. Je l’ai créé pour les abeilles, chaque plante est utile pour la pollinisation. Il y a des arbres fruitiers, beaucoup d’herbe, une serre artificielle, des légumes... »
...
editors: Dennis Dollens; authors: Dennis Dollens; title: AnneMarie Maees. Bees. Rights of Nature; distribution: autopoietix.blog.it; ISBN:
Circulating through the Fundació Miró, I’m reminded that the 1972 museum building was designed by Josep Luís Sert and, that the exhibition I’m seeking, was curated by Martina Millà. There, in collaboration with the building’s space and curatorial brief, AnneMarie Maes investigates the too-little-appreciated cognitive performance between bees, nature, and humans. Doing so, her installation delivers glimpses of bee intelligence. In this artist-, architect-, curator-, mediated space, a species’ cognition — nearly foreign to hu...
The complex bee ecosystem and its influence on others has been underlined by science, such as the threats caused by the urban pollution. “Intelligent Guerilla Beehive” is a beehive designed to allow bee colonies to survive in particularly compromised urban environments. It is a sensitive device that reacts to possible environmental pollution and contributes internally to the preservation of bee health.
editors: Emi Vergels; title: 5 reasons not to miss ...; distribution: the WORD; ISBN:
Five reasons not to miss this year’s BOZAR Electronic Arts Festival. Amongst a long string of cutting-edge expositions, the eye-catching Tendencies: Belgian Art in the Digital Age. In the Feminine #2 is absolutely unmissable. For the second edition of Tendencies – an intricate study of the increasingly blurred boundaries between contemporary arts, media and technology –
editor: KunstWerkt, author: Annemie Vingerhoets title: Werk in de Kijker: Guerilla Beehive (AnneMarie Maes), distribution: KunstWerkt vzw
In elk nummer van KunstLetters stellen we een kunstwerk extra in de kijker. We zoomen in op een bijzonder object of concept dat de praktijk van een kunstenaar typeert.
In dit nummer stelt AnneMarie Maes 'Guerilla Beehive' voor. Deze bijenkorf in een radikaal nieuwe vorm is het resultaat van haar zoektocht naar nieuwe materialen en fabricagemogelijkheden.
title: 4321 Vragen aan 123 Kunstenaars; editor: MERbooks.be ; author: Hilde Van Canneyt; distribution: Borgerhoff&Lamberigts; ISBN 9789463932226
Hilde Van Canneyt interviewt kunstenaars uit België en Nederland, in het boek ' 4321 vragen aan 123 Kunstenaars'. Publicatie Borgerhoff&Lamberigts en merbooks.be, 2020. Interview met AnneMarie Maes afgenomen Herfst 2016.
editor: La Vanguardia, author: Vida, title: Una exposición muestra en Barcelona la vida de las abejas en las ciudades, distribution: newspaper+online
Barcelona, 7 may (EFE).- La importancia de la vida de las abejas en las zonas urbanas se explica en una exposición organizada por el Instituto de Biología Evolutiva (UPF-CSIC) que se ha inaugurado hoy en el vestíbulo del edificio del Centro Mediterráneo de Investigaciones Marinas y Ambientales de Barcelona.
Summer and autumn 2011 we were visited by several television crews, due to the participation in the Open Gardens city circuit organized by the bibliothèque René Péchère.
Several News or Garden programs covered our intensive edible rooftopgarden in a short documentary.
TV Brussel were the first to film, on september 25th 2011. A day later, the crew from Jardins et Loisirs / RTBF followed. The young guys from Ushuaia TV experimented in the rooftop with their Canon 7D cameras and travel stuff, for the program Garden party, on november 22nd 2011.
author: AnneMarie Maes, title: Travelling through OpenGreens, published in the TIK Publication 2011 - ISBN 9789081898508
The Time Inventors’ Kabinet connects local OpenGreens in an international network of experimental gardens where artists work with natural processes.
These gardening situations serve especially to look into microsociological and ecological systems related to time as starting points for the development of new artistic practices. The OpenGreens allow us to study the implementation of contemporary art in an ecological context and to observe and draw content from eco-data and natural patterns and processes.
Using media technology and electronics a...
author: AnneMarie Maes, title: Study on the ecology of urban habitats, guided by the observation of city honeybees, published at the occasion of the TIK (Time Inventors Kabinet) conference in Graz (2010)
The range of habitats in urban areas is surprising. Most of the major terrestrial habitat types are represented in towns and cities, either as remnants of previously rural environments, or as artificial analogues of semi-natural habitats.
The OpenGreens project focuses on two rooftopgardens located in Brussels’ city center on 400 m from one another: an edible forest rooftop garden on top of a parking lot and a wild flower rooftop garden on top of an old w...
name: Connected OpenGreens, publication, year start: 2009, year end: 2010, pictures and texts: annemie maes techniques: independent publishing
Connected Open Greens is a publication covering the actions from 2009 to 2010 in the Open Air Lab 'Connected OpenGreens'.
The Open Green project blends organic and technological matter into one and the same nature. Through analogue and digital means we do long term observations on the growth, blossoming and decay of plants and insects submitted to natural elements such as wind, sun, rain and pollution in an urban context.
author: AnneMarie Maes, title: Politics of Change: on Eco-Technology and Hands-On Workshops, published: 2009, published in: Magazine Art is Politics (edition 2009)
My interest in the women Solar Engineers and the Mahila Samiti groups for women’s empowerment in Rajasthan comes out of a personal involvement that links art, women empowerment, ecology, technology and social engagement. When I learned about the Barefoot College project, I was struck by certain similarities between two practices that seem worlds apart at first sight: my own artistic work environment and the practical trainings/workshops in Rajasthan.
Okno is an artist-run organization for media, a...
authors: the artists, scientists and designers of the x-med-a workshops, editors: OKNO (AnneMarie Maes), FoAM (Maja Kuzmanovic), nadine (nadine), Imal (Yves Bernard), title: x-med-a (2006), ISBN 9081073311
The review originated from a series of technically and artistically diverse workshops, organised by four independent technological arts initiatives in Brussels: FoAM, nadine, OKNO, and iMAL. The workshops responded to the need for a place where continuous learning and dialogue between peers is encouraged, with the objective of sharing of experience, skills and knowledge among diverse groups interested in emerging ideas, media and technologies.
author: AnneMarie Maes [so-on], title: No2Pho [from Noise to Voice], published in: x-med-a [experimental media arts] - ISBN 9081073311
No2Pho is an artistic research project investigating the behaviour of language in its many appearances: textual, sonic and visual, as well as gestural or body language. How do these disparate elements relate to each other and how do they organize within a system which includes human and computer as a sender and a receiver [and vice versa]?
As a generative sound installation No2Pho plays with a connected set of elements. It is composed of dissonant synthetic voices, changing in real time from speech to sound. The multiple voices...
author: Sarah Kesenne, title: Zonder Interactie gebeurt er niets, published in: RUIS Magazine (september 2006)
Nieuwe mediakunst mag dan een even veelkoppig als ongrijpbaar beestje zijn, het is zeker dat we in de toekomst nog veel zullen horen over kunstenaars die internet, nieuwe technologieën en interactiviteit in hun manifesten hebben getypt. Annemie Maes is een van de crazy scientists die achter de schermen van de collectieven OKNO, So-On en Code 31 aan haar installaties en projecten verder brouwt. Annemie's NOTOVO installatie op het Happy New Ears festival in Kortrijk leek een gepaste reden om haar een bezoekje te brengen in haar loft aan het kanaal ...
author: AnneMarie Maes [so-on], title: Interview with Akihiro Kubota, published: 2006, published in: x-med-a [experimental media arts] - ISBN 9081073311
[s-o] You define yourself as a digital materialist. Can you explain what you mean by this and what your artistic background is?
[AK] 'Digital materialism' is the fundamental concept for my audio-visual work: installations and performances. I see the computer not as a tool but as a raw material for generating artworks, similar to stone, wood, iron and so on.
author: AnneMarie Maes [so-on], title: Reflections on OKNO and Looking Glass - a conversation between so-on and the jabberwocky generator, published: 2006, published in: x-med-a [experimental media arts] - ISBN 9081073311
A conversation between so-on and the jabberwocky generator.
... It seems to fill my head with ideas - only I don't know exactly what they are. There's a devil in the Looking Glass! The imagination of technology. Investigations of expressivity are interesting, starting from historical texts. Teaching, learning and development of new projects is referred to the experiment with the presented original. Visualization of the installations of emerging...
author: AnneMarie Maes, title: The poetics of performance cinema:
een artistiek onderzoek naar actuele, realtime presentatievormen beeld/geluid, published in: Art is Politics Magazine (edition 2005)
Welke zijn de vernieuwende expressievormen in de geschiedenis van de 20ste eeuwse kunst, en wat hadden deze tot gevolg voor de verhouding kijker/kunstwerk? Bouwen de hedendaagse mediakunstenaars voort op de experimenten van hun voorgangers, of liggen de zwaartepunten op een totaal ander terrein? Welke gevolgen heeft deze artistieke expressieve vernieuwing op de maatschappelijke status van kunstenaar en kunstwerk?
Historische referenties zijn de ‘abstract cinema’ van...
author: AnneMarie Maes, title: Continuum Cinema: the Vision Machine, published in: VUB Press 2004
Continuum Cinema : the Vision Machine is een onderzoeksproject naar de productie-, presentatie en perceptie van collaboratieve werken in de hedendaagse kunst.
Cinema moet hier gelezen worden zoals gedefinieerd door Peter Greenaway : "de totale som van alle technologië die ingezet worden ter bevordering van het bewegend beeld : film, computer en digitaal beeld, en structuren als gesproken en geschreven woord, acting, montage, klank en licht."
Het is een ruim onderzoek, dat gevoerd wordt vanuit de taal van de nieuwe media. Het project onderzoekt het ontstaan ...
author: Dirk De Wit, title: People Database Archive: Gesprek met Annemie Maes (Dirk De Wit en Els Roelandt), published in: Digitaal Platform, naar aanleiding van de ARGOS presentatie over kunstenaarsarchieven (2003)
Gesprek met Annemie Maes - 19 Mei 2003
Met: Annemie Maes (Unamas Projects), Els Roelandt (A Prior Magazine) Dirk De Wit (Interviewer)
Annemie Maes studeerde grafische kunst aan St. Lukas Brussel. Daarna werkte ze voor 5 jaar als grafisch ontwerpster voor de ancienne belgique in Brussel. In 1998 startte ze samen met Jan Bultheel het filmproductiebedrijf pix&motion, waar ze actief was als producer en regisseur. In 1998 organiseerde ze het project...
author: Annemie Maes, title: People Database Archive: Het Archief als Kunstproject, Brussels, Luca School of Arts
In een persoonlijk archief werkt de kunstenaar met zijn uitgebreide databank aan beelden en gevoelens en onderzoekt via bepaalde combinaties van heden en verleden de eigen identiteit. Het archief van de identiteit is opgebouwd uit een veelheid aan socio-culturele, historische en psychologische elementen en invloeden. Op hun beurt spelen tijd, plaats en geheugen hierin een belangrijke rol. Het onuitputtelijke aantal combinaties van deze elementen vormt voor de kunstenaar een ideaal speelterrein voor onderzoek van bepaalde constructies.Het archief...
author: Patrick Van Rossem, title: Closed Circuits #2, Brussel 1999, published in: catalogue Art in Public Space - ISBN
In de jaren '90 kende de idee kunst in de publieke ruimte, na 25 jaar artistiek experiment omtrent de "blurring between art and life" (Allan Kaprow) en de veelvuldig gestelde vraag naar de betekenis van kunst voor het leven, een verschuiving van het opsmukken van de fysieke omgeving en het promoten van een esthetische kwaliteit, naar het leveren van een concrete bijdrage aan de kwaliteit van dit leven.
Het traditioneel tentoonstellingsmaken, waarin de bestaande kunstwerken tentoongesteld werden in een specifieke configuratie, werd steeds...
This page gives an overview of the 10 most recents posts contributed to all different sections of the research category at large. For a complete overview of a specific topic within research, as bee monitoring, intelligent beehives, urban corridors or other topics: please click on the appropriate label in the submenu.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives...
Under this research category you can find all theoretical- and field research contributing to the project Politics Of Change (POC). Articles cover as well the social, ecological, historical, economical and political aspects of changes made by small communities. Displayed on this page are the 10 most recent posts contributed to the topic. For a complete overview of all posts per subtopic of research, please navigate to- and check the relevant category.
This work is licensed under...
Politics of Change was a gathering in Brussels during a 3-day workshop arranged by so-on and hosted by okno, both cultural organizations composed of several members engaged in different aspects of the artistic creation.
The call, made by the filmmaker and activist Annemie Maes, had different goals. One of them was to reflect on topics as gender and activism in the cultural field, another was the sharing of common technical tools to be used for sharing and spreading the word. One of the main issues we confront today as artists, thinkers and activists, is the fragmentation of our landscapes and the difficulty of access to mainstream media.
The artistic and cultural field remains a field where only a few actors achieve a mega status and become icons. Which strategy should be used to raise the number of multiplicators and create networks to get support and collaboration?
The participants in the workshop came from different fields, writers, students, filmmakers, anthropologists, journalists, visual artists, economists, researchers.
Barefoot College has changed a lot compared to 36 years ago when we started. What is applicable in Tilonia - its overall vision - can be replicated anywhere else. In this country and abroad, but it needs a change of mindsets.
We are organized in a disorganized way. We have small committees for different topics. We have the housing committee, the water committee, the salary committee. Salaries can go up and down, depending on your performance. You have also the possibility to evaluate yourself. Poverty, teamwork, gender are all issues coming into play for evaluation. Points are added up, but nobody can get more than 100 U$.
The options are open. The organization is set up as a community so obviously there will always be somebody to run it.
Under this research category you can find all theoretical- and field research contributing to the project Urban Corridors. Articles cover as well the biological as social, historical, economical and political aspects of ecological corridors in the city. This page shows the 10 most recent posts that contribute to the topic. For a complete overview of all posts per subtopic, please check the relevant category. The links Urban ArtFarm 2012, 2013 and 2014 display all fieldnotes related to the timeline-development of the Urban ArtFarm since the start.
5 years later, a foodforest with a good harvest during a long hot and dry summer ... pumpkins going wild, wasps eating cellulose skins and the foodforest is thriving ... hungry bees go eat the sugars from the raspberries and hungry wasps prefer the sugars of the grapes ... the rooftopgarden is in good shape!
The Urban ArtFarm is an experimental station for Urban Agriculture. It researches and analyses the pro and contra's of growing food in the city on rooftops of bigger buildings, with the help of green DIY technology. How does a rooftop ecosystem deal with energy, water, soil and green technology? What does the project represent financially? How do plants and animals (city honeybees) interact with this artificial ecosystem?
UAF (Urban ArtFarm) is an open air laboratory that interacts with the city. The base station is built on connected rooftops in the historical center of Brussels, connections or nodes to this location can be setup on any other rooftop that is suitable for the purpose. The groundlevel...
The Urban ArtFarm is an experimental station for Urban Agriculture. It researches and analyses the pro and contra's of growing food in the city on rooftops of bigger buildings, with the help of green DIY technology. How does a rooftop ecosystem deal with energy, water, soil and green technology? What does the project represent financially? How do plants and animals (city honeybees) interact with this artificial ecosystem?
UAF (Urban ArtFarm) is an open air laboratory that connects with the city. The base station is built on contiguous rooftops in the historical center of Brussels, connections or nodes to this location can be setup on any other rooftop that is suitable for the purpose. The groundlevel...
Biological corridor is the designation for a continuous geographic extent of habitat linking ecosystems, either spatially or functionally; such a link restores or conserves the connection between habitats that are fragmented by natural causes or human development. Such corridors are an important aspect in the preservation of species richness and biodiversity. There are different scales of biological corridors, but all share the same purpose of providing connections for species through fragmented landscapes.
A biological corridor, alternatively termed habitat corridor, is used for the transportation functions of fauna and seed dispersal/propagation routes for flora and lower life forms....
Since 2009, we are researching the co-evolution between city honeybees and urban ecosystems in our OpenGreens and Bee Monitoring programs. Bee colonies are now 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.
The research program surveys in an artistic way the multiple fields of interaction between honeybees and the (urban) ecosystem. It is remarkable to see how a bee population functions and evolves very much in accordance to the human activities we are developing around them: gardening and (urban) agriculture. The production of honey is different...
The sound beehive experiment. A laboratory to study the development of the colony through its own sounds.
We will execute daily observations at the flight hole as well as record and archive sound recordings at regular time intervals. There will be a camera in topshot above the entry of the hive, filming at 30fps. A second camera will film the action inside of the beehive. All sensors, microphones and camera's are synchronized and timestamped. A playlist will be available for online visitors. The data flow will be analysed by specialists in bio-acoustics, using machine learning and complex systems techniques. Video and annotations will be available in the okno.pandora.be...
The relation to the environment is extremely important for honey bees. In the research towards intelligent beehive designs we got very inspired by the relationship between the flowers and the bees. In this part of the study we take a close look at the pollen morphology, their shape, color and size.
Palynology is the study of pollen grains and other spores. Determination of the pollen, brought by the bees to the hive, can help us to map the foraging areas of the bees. It can give us useful information on the environment, for a wide range of purposes.
The pollen database is a project in collaboration with Masatoshi Funabashi from the Sony Research Lab in Tokyo. June 2013 we decided to work on...
In the research towards intelligent beehive designs I start experimenting with mycelium growing on different substrates recycled from waste. This page hosts the documentation of the experiments and try outs over time in the lab.
The next step is the the research on biodegradable sensors and the focus to integrate them in the hives in a non-intrusive way. Peter Hanappe from Sony CSL Research Lab Paris leads the sensor development team, and AnneMarie Maes from OKNO Brussels is responsible for the field teststing sites in Brussels where the sensors will be tested in 10 beehives at the pace of a bee-season. Slow art, slow science.
OpenSource Beehives is a collaboration between OKNO and Fab Lab Barcelona.
The approach is to work on an Open Structures version of a Warré beehive model for sustainable beekeeping. We start to fablab this model early april 2013 and it is installed in Brussels and Valldaura (Barcelona) in spring 2013.
Under this research category you can find all theoretical- and field research contributing to the project Bee Laboratory. Articles cover as well the biological as social, historical, economical and political aspects of bee monitoring. Displayed on this page are the 10 most recent posts contributed to the topic. For a complete overview of all posts per subtopic of research, please navigate to- and check the relevant subcategory.
This work is licensed under a Creative...
Our 2 OpenGreens rooftop gardens host 10 beehives. In summer, the 2 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 and are the start of a green corridor in the city.
The hives in each of the gardens are populated with Apis mellifera carnica. Honeybees are a good bio-indicators. Biological indicators are species that are used to monitor the health of their ecosystem. They can tell us about the cumulative effects of different pollutants in the ecosystem. Therefore we study the honeybees : their behaviour, their distributed int...
Our 2 OpenGreens rooftop gardens host 10 beehives. In summer, the 2 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 and are the start of a green corridor in the city.
The hives in each of the gardens are populated with Apis mellifera carnica. Honeybees are a good bio-indicators. Biological indicators are species that are used to monitor the health of their ecosystem. They can tell us about the cumulative effects of different pollutants in the ecosystem. Therefore we study the honeybees : their behaviour, their distributed int...
During the opening weekend of Berlin Art Week 2024, artists Anne Marie Maes and Margarita Maximova activated their installation "Swarm Dust" at nGbK Berlin with a tea ceremony. The performance is conceived as a “walking meditation,” where performers and audience undergo a shared meditative experience on a molecular level. This event combines taste, smoke, and sound into a live listening performance, with sound assistence by Hara Alonso.
Finissage of the Exhibition Cyfest#15: Vulnerability and Presentation of Umbigo Magazine #88 and #89.
Round table discussion on the topic: Art, Technology and Ecology and the Importance of Publications in the Art Ecosystem.
CYFEST 15, including Anne Marie Maes’ Sensorial Skins project, is open to the public at the CREA in Venice until August 30, 2024.
Finissage Cyfest#15: Vulnerability and Presentation of Umbigo Magazine #88 and #89.
Finissage of the exhibition 'The Matter of Kinship' at Mateus Foundation, Vila Real (Pt).
Program:
Friday, 26th, 18h00: Presentation of the publication Matter of Kinship/Field Notes, with the presence the artist and Jonathan Minchin, Teresa de Albuquerque and Luís Alegre (Stolen Books publisher). Followed by the launch of Umbigo Magazine 1/2024 with a contribution by Anne Marie Maes, in presence of Elsa Garcia and António Neu (Umbigo), Álvaro Domingues (geographer University of Porto) and Jorge Leandro Rosa (essayist on aestethics, art and philosophy).
Visite du jardin de l'artiste Anne Marie Maes, atelier pour les étudiants de La Cambre - proposé par Erwin Mahéo et Sonia Dermience.
Il s’agit de s’intéresser à l’espace particulier qu’est un jardin et de se pencher sur les multiples types de jardins qui peuvent exister dans les villes comme hors des villes : qu’est-ce qu’un jardin ? un jardinier ? On peut parler de jardins collectifs, de « jardins ouvriers », de jardins philosophiques, de jardins d’artistes…
The biodesign module is a series of hands-on workshops that immerse you in the world of bio-based materials and solutions. You will gain biological insights, question your anthropocentric worldview and develop an ethical view on synthetic biology. You will also get to work yourself and experiment with algae, fungi,.... In this workshop series, you will be guided by experts; inspiring speakers
Ecologies of Art: Ways of Making, Conserving, and Knowing. More specifically, this lecture will focus on 'Conservation, Art/Nature, and Insects' and will relate different perspectives. There will be a deeper look at the making process as well as conservation issues.
We care. Caress. Connect. Ook in 2023. We maken er meteen ons jaarthema van. Samen met kunstenaars, tentoonstellingsmakers, schrijvers, architecten, curatoren, ontwerpers, buren en vrienden koesteren we verhalen en verbeeldingen in de wereld van de kunsten. We verbinden onszelf met de idee van betrokkenheid. We denken over ons, de wereld, het private en het publieke. We delen onze gedachten, benieuwd en nieuwsgierig, vanaf februari maandelijks op zondag, om 11:00 in het auditorium van Mu.ZEE.
Lecture on the 'Intelligent Guerrilla Beehive' project, as part of the course 'Honeybee Colonies' taught by Mark Randall at the Parsons School of Design in New York, USA.
In the 19th century, the bee was a popular symbol of industry and co-operation. Caricaturist George Cruikshank's 1840 drawing the British Bee Hive, illustrates a diverse range of English professions within a stringent and divided pyramid-based social hierarchy. For thousands of years, humans have had a close relationship with bees.
Resident bio-artist AnneMarie Maes welcomes the public to her studio at the Casa de Mateus Foundation on Sunday, August 27, at 5 p.m., to present her work, which will conclude with an exhibition on November 15.
Architect Jonathan Minchin, a researcher into ecological interactions, will explain the relationship between this artistic work and the "School of Transitions" program run by the Casa de Mateus Foundation.
The European project "More-than-Planet" (2022 - 2025) gives voice to the imaginaries of planetarity, starting from the observation that it is urgent to re-examine the way people understand and represent the environment. This "Ocean-Space-Ocean" edition of the "More-Than-Planet" symposium series will bring together artists and researchers to question the role of the oceans in planetary balances and the perspectives offered by marine biodiversity in the ecological transition.
‘Rituals with Microbial Ancestors’ est une performance qui découle de l'alchimie créée lors des processus de fermentation. Insinuant un futur possible dans lequel différents mondes créent un univers à la fois terrestre et aquatique, humain et bactérien, la performance explore poétiquement la relation étroite et fascinante entre les humains et les bactéries.
'Rituals with Microbial Ancestors' is a performance that stems from the alchemy created during fermentation processes. Insinuating a possible future in which different worlds create a universe that is both terrestrial and aquatic, human and bacterial, the performance poetically explores the close and fascinating relationship between humans and bacteria. Anne Marie Maes invites us to consider what the future of coexistence might look like in a world where our ecological consciousness is constantly evolving and speculative time fluctuates through a network. Do we reject or embrace these tiny organisms as they weave a membrane of space-time around our bodies? Can we become entwined in an erotic...
Jeudi 30 mars 2023, la Kunsthalle de Mulhouse organise le colloque "Associer l’artiste et le chercheur pour penser une société contemporaine". Avec la participation de Christophe Chaillou (enseignant à l’Universite de Lille & chargé de mission Art & Sciences), Fernando Garcia-Dory (artiste), Guillaume Logé (chercheur associe à l’Universite Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne), Anne Marie Maes (artiste) et Luc Steels (scientifique).
ASU-LASER talk: Fermentation
Emerge 2022: Eating at the Edges - A Festival of Food Futures.
The event will take place on Saturday, November 19 at 1 pm MST. The topic is Fermentation.
LASER ASU-CYLAND: Fermentation will take place at the Emerge Festival in Mesa, Arizona. This year’s festival explores our relationship with food and what that will look like in a future with severe environmental challenges.
The Garden of Knowledge:
on Symbiosis, Fermentation and Interspecies Collaboration
My rooftop garden is my laboratory. It is my training ground to develop my creativity, and it enables me to have an active dialogue with living material. It is a space where thinking and manual work go hand in hand. It connects the visible with the invisible and brings together making and performing. My art research is based on a collaboration with living organisms such as plants, insects and bacteria.
In its second term from 2018 to 2020 with the title HAMBURG MASCHINE, the urban initiative project "Stadtkuratorin Hamburg" revolved around the theme of digitality in the context of art in the public sphere. This publication documents, updates, and expands the program developed and curated by Dirck Möllmann. The artists invited by him have created photo spreads about their projects and talked about their work with dialog partners of their choice.
La Grange propose une soirée de rencontres et de discussions pour explorer le lien entre les arts et les sciences et les collaborations possibles entre chercheurexs et artistes. Quel est l’historique de ces relations ? Comment cette approche peut-elle bénéficier des changements sociétaux actuels ? Quels en sont les développements possibles?
In het traject Connect2Nature willen we werken aan een evenwicht tussen lichaam en geest door te connecteren met de Natuur. Dit doen we zowel op fysisch als op psychisch niveau. De workshop Connect2Nature kadert binnen het project 2Spaces. 2Spaces onderzoekt hoe kunst en digitale technologie kunnen bijdragen aan het welzijn van AYAs, jonge kankerpatiënten. Daarvoor worden Design Thinking en Art Thinking te gecombineert.
EMBODIED BODIES
Inspired by the work of biologist Lynn Margulis on the concept of Symbiosis and her understanding of the human body as a Holobiont(an ecosystem where human cells cohabit with multiple other life forms), this performance explores what it means to experience ourselves, our bodies as not strictly human but as a community of interrelated and interdependent organisms, cohabiting and inter-reacting with one another, providing for each other, living together.
Edith Doove interviews AnneMarie Maes about her project ‘BEE AGENCY’. They discuss amongst others how AnneMarie came to work with bees, how this led to working with bacteria and algae and above all what the bees are telling us and how AnneMarie works with their sounds in different compositions. The program is part of the Biennale Nova_XX and was produced by the Centre Wallonie Bruxelles in Paris.
“Venice as a Model for the Future?” is curated by Barbara Casavecchia and Pietro Consolandi for TBA21−Academy and Ocean Space. This chapter moves beyond the urban boundaries of the city of Venice towards the islands of its lagoon. The participants direct their steps and gazes to the land and the seascapes created by the interaction between various species, not only human, that inhabit them: from coastal sand to garden soil, from salt marshes, a thriving home to wild plants and birds, to seabeds populated by tiny fish and molluscs.
Climate change is one of the most pressing issues of our time and its devastating impact is already felt strongly in cities like Venice, which are struggling to remain sustainable and habitable. Dealing with climate change not only requires science and technology but the cooperation from everybody in society. One step to help achieve this cooperation is through the construction of archives about dramatic events related to climate change.
The blue economy is an unknown stronghold in Flanders. Discover all about it in an extensive dossier in “De Tijd” — Belgium’s leading financial times —, with articles, reports and videos. From now on you’ll be looking at the North Sea differently.
In this context, we visited the studio of artist AnneMarie Maes in Brussels and talked with her about the innovative potential of algae.
In 2021 there will be four talks, starting Tuesday 20 April with a conversation with Annemarie Maes, artist and researcher, and Camilla Colombo, curator. Edith Doove will be moderator. Annemarie Maes is showing her exhibition SENSORIAL SKINS – WOVEN BY NATURE, in 2 parts at PILAR, House for Art and Science – Brussels 8 – 23 April 2021 iMAL, Art Center for Digital Culture and Technology – Brussels 29 April – 16 May 2021 with Camilla Colombo as curator.
GLIMPS.bio-LABS is a unique deep-dive experience merging biofabrication, biomimicry, art and design. It’s the best way to connect with scientists, artists and designers for an exploration of the bio-future we envision together with our partners. We have diverse modules in which you can experiment with hands-on biofabrication, kickstart your own bio-inspired project and learn about bio-inspired design, biomaterials and circular economy.
On Bio-art and bio-fabrication: A process at the intersection of art and science.
AnneMarie Maes will talk about her artistic practice, covering biomimicry in bioart and biofabrication. She will give an overview of the development processes of her most important works (BEE Agency, the Laboratory of Form and Matter, Sensorial Skin) and explain how she is collaborating with scientists to deepen artisic research and dive beyond the aesthetic level by adding social and ecological engagement.
Ce panel regroupe une serie d’interventions de 4 artistes. Nous avons regroupé nos interventions sous le titre « le non-humain sous 4 rapports ». Certes il peut paraître un peu curieux dans un colloque sur l’humain d’aborder la question par la négative, d’autant que le concept de non-humain a été mobilisé plusieurs fois au cours de ces journées.
'Saloon' is an international network of women working in the art scenes of Berlin, Barcelona, Brussels, Dresden Hamburg, London, Paris, Prague, Tel Aviv and Vienna as curators, artists or journalists, as well as in galleries, museums or universities.
The panel will bring in different points of view on the topic of art and science collaborations, to tackle questions such as what does it mean to build bridges between artistic and scientific disciplines, especially in this society of hyper specialization and fragmentation?
What does make a collaboration between artist and scientist successful?
How to present the outcomes of this collaborations to our audiences, playing the key role of mediators in sensible and meaningful way?
Abstract: Artists and scientists as both maker-oriented thinkers open up approaches with more space for reflection and discussion when forming collaborations. How can these spaces, these hybrid laboratories, being created and sustained in and outside institutional contexts?
Prof. Raoul Frese, Hybrid Labs - artist AnneMarie Maes
Often asepticised, secluded and reserved for scientific purposes, a laboratory is a place for scrutiny. Seemingly opposed to the immaculate space of scientific research, is the artist’s studio. Expected to reflect on creativity, the studio tends to be subject to preconceptions. For two types of creativity, two separate shelters. Nonetheless, scientists as well as artists seek « a place providing opportunity for experimentation, observation, or practice in a field of study ».
05/07/2019 - UN/GREEN - Public Keynotes and Artist Talks
Moderated by: Rasa SMITE
Agnes MEYER BRANDIS / AnneMarie MAES / Peter ZORN
Venue: The Latvian National Museum of Art
http://festival2019.rixc.org/
AnneMarie MAES. Intelligent Beehives (25 min + 5 min) Sensorial Skin for an Intelligent Guerrilla Beehive
In her talk, AnneMarie Maes will give a quick introduction of the current state of the art of bioart and biodesign in an international context.
Presentation of the projects BEE AGENCY and THE INTELLIGENT GUERRILLA BEEHIVE for the students of the Biomedical Laboratory Sciences at Erasmus Hogeschool Brussels. Soon we will work in the Open BioLab on the follow up of the Guerrilla Beehive project, and I will teach some workshops on renewable materials, e.g. microbial cellulose and mycelium as fabric.
Bio-art: artistic research & production inspired by science
AnneMarie Maes will talk about her artistic research, including the fieldwork and the collaborations with scientists, and how this research is translated in the production of artworks.
The workshop -the Umwelt of the Forager- will be studying the bio
semiotics of the beehive & its ecosystem. The workshop will be
organized as a DYI BioLab: the starting point is the role of pheromones
and the important task these signifiers play for the communication in
the beehive and for the relation of the bees to their ecosystem.
Participants will be sensing the ecology of the beehive and interpret the emergence of symbols. They will be detecting the granularity of waves formed between bacterial signals and the signs emitted through invisible (bio)technologies.
Artist talks, moderated by Yvonne Volckart.
With: Rasa Smite & Raitis Smits, Ursula Biemann, Maria Castellanos, HeHe, Knowbotiq Research, Marcus Maeder, Vanessa Lorenzo, AnneMarie Maes, Aline Veillat, Baggenstos/Rudolf.
Yvonne questions if media and sensing technologies might enhance our empathic relations towards our environment and non-humans or not, and if we need this or not.
The work of AnneMarie Maes is a tight coupling between art and science. It meanders on the edge of biology, ecology and technology. AnneMarie Maes’ artistic research is materialized in techno-organic objects that are inspired by factual/fictional stories; in artifacts that are a combination of digital fabrication and craftsmanship; in installations that reflect both the problem and the (possible) solution, in multispecies collaborations, in polymorphic forms and models created by eco-data.
Lectures in 2017 | In this edition, we continue to explore to what extent nature can be altered, bent, or hacked by the interference of designers and artists. How do they facilitate the visualisation of transformations and complex processes in our natural systems?
Six designers/researchers reflect on how these evolutions lead to fundamental shifts on our Anthropocene planet and beyond.
For a Copernican Revolution – The Art of Transgression.
The exit of corporations, and crossing borders. Transdisciplinarity: how the meeting between the latest technologies, the world of science and artistic creation can invent new and promising work. How to contribute to the creation of new partnerships between these players in these complementary fields.
I am an artist, a beekeeper and a herbalist. My work is a tight coupling between art and science. It draws on the edge of biology, ecology and technology. My research starts from long-term field observations which I translate in factual and/or fictional stories.
My huge collection of eco-data (video, audio and environmental sensor data) is the basis for the creation of techno-organic objects that are a combination of digital fabrication and craftsmanship.
My (often large scale) installations reflect both the problem and the possible solution, and they are mostly build upon multispecies collaborations.
Petcha Kucha on the research & development methods in art/science. The talk is part of BEAF (Bozar Electronic Arts Festival) and Tendencies #02 and is focussing on biotechnological processes, bacteria as living technology and problem solving in working with living organisms.
Belgian artist AnneMarie Maes presents her project ‘Sensorial Skin for an Intelligent Guerilla Beehive’.
'The Intelligent Guerilla Beehive is a speculative research project that combines in a radical way smart materials, biomimetic forms and biotechnology. It is inspired by the intelligence, complexity and self-organisation of bee colonies as Super Organisms.
AnneMarie Maes is an artist and a researcher. Her art meanders on the edge of biology, ecology and technology. Her research practice combines art and science with a strong interest for DIY technologies. She works with a range of biological, digital and traditional media, including live organisms.
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.
This page gives an overview of all presentations related to the Politics of Change project. It makes no distinction between media. A presentation can be a participation in a festival, in an exhibition, a workshop, a walk, a talk, …
Hosting welcomes and celebrates the artistic diversity of the Brussels scene, opening up to the city, to its periphery, its artists and its audiences. The exhibition is presented as a large-scale cabinet of curiosities occupying all of Centrale’s spaces.
Inspired by the Summer Exhibition, an annual event held at the Royal Academy in London, hosting is an open call to Brussels-based artists of all generations and disciplines in the visual arts. The Brussels Art Centre is intent on welcoming artists from both the city’s center and its periphery, thus outlining the contours of a wider and more inclusive city,
De installatie Sensorial Skins richt zich op de sculpturale capaciteiten van alledaagse organische materialen: huiden, membranen en biofilms. Sensorial Skins zijn complexe contactoppervlakken. Ze prikkelen onze zintuigen door hun materialiteit, hun texturen, hun pigmenten en hun geuren. Sommige van deze stoffen worden door bacteriën gekweekt, andere zijn het resultaat van transformatieve processen die doen denken aan een alchemistische praktijk, maar nu geworteld in onderzoek en wetenschappelijke methodologie.
With Swarm Dust / Zwermstof, artist Anne Marie Maes creates an artificial environment as a stage for the unpredictable emergence of life. Semi-transparent skins, grown from colonies of bacteria and yeast, almost completely cover a reflective wall, hanging loosely over sandy gravel and pebbles. The eponymous "swarm dust" is scattered over this gravel: clusters of enlarged mint pollen visualise how complicated and detailed their structure is. The scene is complemented by screens rising from the gravel: Margarita Maximova's video works pick up on the hypnotic and psychedelic properties of plants.
The exhibition The Lives of Animals looks at the subject of animals from the perspective of the visual arts, asking the fundamental question about what an animal is and whether humans can be friends with animals. Participating artists critically examine the attitudes of ‘human exceptionalism’, stemming from the belief that animals do not understand the concept of death or have a sense of future. Can we, and under what circumstances, adopt an animal perspective?
CYLAND MediaArtLab presenteert de expo VULNERABILITY tijdens de Venice Biennale 2024.
De expo Vulnerability kende zijn première in Yerevan, Armenië (2022), reisde daarna naar Miami, USA (2023), en komt nu naar Venetië, Italië (2024).
Vulnerability. De kwetsbaarheid van de biologische ruimte, de sociale ruimte en de cyberspace. Persoonlijke herinneringen en wetenschappelijke verbeelding. Artistiek onderzoek naar niet-menselijk co-auteurschap. Al deze onderwerpen komen aan bod in deze intrigerende groepstentoonstelling.
The (anti)fragility of biological, social and cyberspaces, personal memories, and scientific imagination, the facsimile of rain, artistic exploration of non-human co-authorship, and a connection between knitting patterns and Mandelbrot sets all converge in our new major group exhibition. Ann Marie Maes’ bacterial-grown skins investigate the sculptural potential of organic materials and interfaces between the human and the non-human, the macroscopic and the microscopic.
Kunstenares Anne Marie Maes woont en werkt in Brussel. In haar stedelijke biotoop combineert ze wetenschappelijke inzichten met haar artistieke praktijk en multidisciplinair onderzoek. Als imker, herboriste en autodidactische ecoloog denkt, werkt en experimenteert Anne Marie met bijen, bacteriën, algen en andere natuurlijke media. Ze combineert haar hands-on biotech-creaties vaak met data en technologie.
In the 1980s and 1990s a new wind was blowing in many sciences, based on the realization that various complex phenomena in Nature can be understood by viewing them as self-organizing dynamical systems. Typical examples are tornados, meandering rivers, paths formed by ant colonies, chemical oscillations, patterns on a zebra skin, honeycombs in beehives, coordinated activities in neural networks in the brain, crashes in the stock market, and many more. A new science of complex systems was born coinciding with profound mathematical developments in fractal geometry, chaos theory and the study of large-scale networks.
Artist Anne Marie Maes installed her mobile studio on the grounds of Casa de Mateus. She carefully observed the different ecologies and responded with interventions to the specific aspects of the vast domain. With her work, she subtly introduces angles that show the site from a new perspective. Her interventions break the daily routines of the site and make others look at the environment of Casa de Mateus with new eyes.
Pourquoi peut-on parler de l’émergence d’une nouvelle forme de perspective en art, quelque six cents ans après les théorisations de la perspective linéaire de la Renaissance des XVe et XVIe siècles qui ont ouvert la voie de la modernité ? Quelles sont les caractéristiques de cette nouvelle perspective ? De quelles façons est-elle intimement liée au contexte écologique que nous connaissons ? Que dit-elle de notre époque et qu’ouvre-t-elle comme horizons?
Just as human skin carries the imprints of time, bacterial grown skins age and transform.
Within their folds, memories are preserved, silently narrating the stories of their existence. Memories reside not only in the folds of these Sensorial Skins but also in the smells they emit. A specific scent can transport us back to a particular moment, evoking a sense of nostalgia and temporal connection.
Pour la Nuit Blanche 2023, Point Éphémère présente les installations de trois artistes lauréates d’ISEA2023, le 28ème Symposium International de la Création Numérique. Dasha Ilina, Yoon Chung Han et Anne Marie Maes sont trois artistes issues de divers horizons. Si les pratiques de ces dernières varient, elles ont pour point commun de porter une réflexion sur les questions de technologie, de biologie et de sciences.
In residence throughout the year, Belgian bio-artist Anne Marie Maes - whose practice combines art and science with a special interest in biotechnology, ecosystems, and alchemical processes - will install her Laboratory of Form and Matter at Casa de Mateus. A place of discovery of the biodiversity present within the Foundation's perimeter, this atelier & laboratory will also be the place to unfold the infinite forms of visual representation of what is around us: the nature we see, but also what we don't see, such as bacteria that produce fabrics or invent new palettes.
À quoi ressemblera le monde de demain ? Depuis des siècles, les sociétés essayent de donner une réponse à cette question et de se projeter dans le futur, si proche et si lointain.
Nous avons beau élaborer les théories de futurologie ou faire tourner des outils des prédictions statistiques, face au temps, l’imagination est la seule réelle porte d'entrée dans le futur.
Des premières peintures rupestres à l’imagerie générée par ordinateur, l’être humain produit des images avec lesquelles il pense le monde et auxquelles il attribue diverses fonctions : intermédiaires au sein d’interactions sociales, icônes, objets de savoir, indices...
Let's Fill This Town With Artists, #3, a groupshow (with Myrthe van der Mark and Saddie Choua) curated by Charlotte Crevits at AHWNN gallery. Anne Marie Maes presents multiple artworks, all emerging from a close contact with the sea. The works figure as an installation, operating on the border between sapiens and fauna.
Le projet Symbiosium (Cosmogonies Spéculatives) réunit artistes, penseurs, créateurs rassemblés autour de démarches artistiques qui sondent la question du vivant, de sa temporalité réductible, la question de la structuration de la réalité et des récits qui la virtualisent. L’exposition est conçue comme un véritable laboratoire de création et d’idées proposé à tous les publics pendant 7 semaines
From 16/2/2023 to 30/3/2023, the Kunsthalle Mulhouse will host Alchimia Nova, an exhibition by Belgian artist Anne Marie Maes, from February 17 to April 30, 2023. For more than 15 years, the artist has been taking a non-anthropocentric look at the world, focusing her research on the symbiotic relationship between all living micro-organisms, including plants, bacteria and fungi.
CYFEST is one of the world’s few nomadic cultural events: in 2022 festival projects (contemporary art, performances and music) will be shown in Yerevan, Armenia, Dartington (UK) and Arizona and New York (USA). The theme of the festival in 2022 is Ferment. The authors of works presented at CYFEST-14 study the diversity of fermentation both as a biological process, and in the broader metaphorical sense.
Overal op zee neemt de activiteit toe. Zonder aan de zee iets te vragen. Zes kunstenaars, die gefascineerd ‘werken’ met de zee, stellen dat in vraag. Heeft de mens geen andere keuze dan de omgeving uit te buiten? Terwijl de industrie waarde put uit de oceaan, onderzoeken zij hoe de zee in haar waarde te laten. Verschillende stemmen spreken voor de zee.
Biotopia is an exhibition that plunges us into the universe of the living beings that populate our planet. The exhibition brings together artists and researchers who question the central position of humans in the world. Biotopia proposes a shifted point of view, immersing ourselves in the heart of non-human societies and opening ourselves up to the diversity of ways of being.
'I sing to you about flowers and colors and smells’ is an immersive multimedia installation by Brussels-based artist Anne Marie Maes. The installation is part of the long term research project ‘Bee Agency’. The soundscape is composed with field recordings made in the beehives of the artist and is mixed with electronics. The installation is working on all senses with a focus on smell.
O Sweet Spontaneous Earth, issu du poème éponyme de E.E. Cummings, est le titre donné à cet ensemble de propositions qui essayent de labourer la terre telle une matière philosophique.
Si la saison « Réclamer La Terre » s’attache à mettre à jour des ramifications nouvelles pour des artistes qui nous aident à penser et ressentir une nature chargée, intensifiée, engagée, fouillant la terre au sens propre et figuré, mettant en avant des récits oubliés ou même à inventer,
Einde jaren 1980. De Canadese kunstenaar Royden Rabinowitch is te gast in Museum Sztuki te Łódź, Polen. Wanneer directeur Ryszard Stanisławski de term “geometric abstract art” in de mond neemt, riposteert Rabinowitch: “But Mr Stanisławski, there is no such thing as geometric abstract art.” Er volgt een ietwat ongemakkelijke stilte. Dan keert de directeur zich naar de kunstenaar en vraagt: “How do you know that?”
Laminaria is a website documenting and comparing marine ecosystems in Europe.
Laminaria operates on the border between sapiens and fauna. It outlines possible futures in a new bio/techno/natural world, a universe that is at once terrestrial and aquatic, a prerequisite for future coexistence.
Early in the morning and late in the evening, between low and high tide, the Theatrum Algaerium rises from the sea. Metal frames hold the fluttering weeds. Glass jars fill up with seawater, their round shapes are acting like a lens and focus on the morphology of the floating algae.
The project “Generation Y” deals with the issues around the role of art in the current environmental crisis. By selecting a series of art projects and presenting them via the online medium Instagram, curator Michele A wants to create a prolific ground on which build a new understanding of the use of technology towards finding new sustainable solutions.
In an era where anthropocentrism defines more than ever the relationship we as humans build with nature, shifting the centre of attention can become a revolutionary act.
The exhibition WOVEN BY NATURE presents a selection of sculptures and installations about the potential of algae and bacteria. Investigating the origin of life as we know it, the works are plunging the viewer in an aquatic atmosphere where blue-green algae are cultured in handmade glass containers that grow on metal structures.
‘Sensorial Skins’ focuses on the sculptural capacities of everyday organic materials: skins, membranes and biofilms. Sensorial Skins are complex surfaces of contact. They arouse our senses through their materiality, their textures, their pigments and their smells.
Some of these fabrics are grown by bacteria, others are the result of transformative processes reminiscent of an alchemical practice but now grounded in fieldwork and scientific methodology.
(en) OORtreders Festival is a 3-day celebration of sound within the landscape of the Limburg Canal Zone. From early morning concerts to deep listening sessions; the festival explores introvert and exciting formats, on the cutting edge of sound and society. This year’s programme changing ecologies & new narratives connects audiences and artists in minimal settings, exploring the unclassifiable relationship between humans and nature through sound.
The Meakusma Weekend will take place in Eupen, Belgium from September 4th to 6th. As an alternative to the Meakusma Festival, which had to be canceled due to the Covid-19 crisis, the Meakusma Festival will be presented in adapted form. There will be genre-crossing live concerts and DJ sets as well as radio art and panel discussions with performing artists. There will also be sound installations, isolated concerts and performances at various locations in Eupen.
In 2019, Dirck Möllman, Hamburg’ city curator, invited AnneMarie Maes for his Urban Art project the Hamburg Maschine (Hamburg Machine), which draws on topics as: ‘What functions can art in future public space have?’ and ‘What meaning will art obtain in a technological society?” The work of AnneMarie Maes fits perfectly to make a complex city feasible and graspable as a machinical texture. She visualizes and exemplifies these big questions gives them an artistic materiality enhanced by modern technology.
The STARTS Residencies Days will take place at CENTQUATRE Paris, France to present some of the main achievements of the STARTS Residencies programme and showcase the results of 3 years of art, technology and science collaborations involving more than 100 artists, scientists and engineers.
Gluon and Cleantech Hub Snowball have joined forces in 2019 to become a Regional STARTS Center. The Regional European centers launch initiatives at the intersection of Science, Technology and Arts to stimulate digital disruptions and more inclusive and sustainable forms of innovation in the industry.
In 2019 the EU launched The New Green Deal as Europe's 'man on the moon moment'. An ambitious plan that would make Europe the first climate-neutral continent by 2050.
Sensorial Skin est une installation de bio-art autour de la tactilité des matières organiques, de couleurs naturelles visuellement attrayantes et de parfums subtils, dans la-quelle les différents composants concourent à faire de l’œuvre une expérience à appréhender à plusieurs niveaux. Il s’agit ici de microbiologie, du monde où des mi-cro-organismes instaurent des relations mutualistes ou parasitaires entre eux pour créer, tisser des structures ou décomposer des matériaux.
This exhibition celebrates the LABORATORIUM/Color biolab and its four years of investigating the color field, offering a transdisciplinary approach to both art and science, in collaboration with María Boto Ordóñez and Kristel Peters, curated by Alice Lefebvre and Bert Puype.
Caput (head): Since Darwin, it is clear that flowers and bees engage in an evolutionary race. The honeybee is a complex insect with numerous sensorial features which are matching perfectly with the demands of sensual plants. The black-and-white photographs reveal the elaborate design of some dissected parts of flowers and honeybees. All samples are collected in the Urban Bee Lab, Maes’ apiary and rooftop garden laboratory in the centre of Brussels.
The 2019 RIXC Festival 2019 aims at complicating the pervasively employed notion of “green” by providing a cross-disciplinary platform for the discussions and artistic interventions exploring one of the most paradoxical and broadest topics of our times. The festival will feature the “Un/Green” exhibition opening that takes place in the Latvian National Museum of Art, and the 4th Open Fields conference which aims to ‘un-green' greenness,
Globalization and the digital world have made traditional borders fluid, generating an incessant flow of people, information and culture. The traditional barriers between the center and the periphery have fallen, and the territory tends to turn into a unique system composed of variously extended and densely populated areas.
Eco‐visionaries (25/05/2019 - 29/10/2019) presents twelve national and international artistic positions that explore the new connections between the biosphere and the technosphere, the latter marked by the imperative presence of the human being on a planet of limited resources.
It is precisely these relationships that the exhibition debates, through a selection of aesthetic and conceptual approaches, utopian narratives and counter‐models to share with a wide audience.
The art project 'Ludwigshafen hums and buzzes' calls attention to the relationship between humankind and nature, by means of an exhibition as well as an intervention in the public space of the city of Ludwigshafen. The project is concerned with the pollinator decline which has been observed over the last decades and has resulted in a considerable reduction in the number of flying insects.
In April 2018, Dirck Möllmann was appointed as the new independent city curator of Hamburg. His program Hamburg Maschine (Hamburg Machine) brings together individual artistic positions, art activism, and discursive elements that establish a tangible and accessible artistic practice. By drawing on the history of public art, the program will open up new paths for urban art in Hamburg.
Wanneer kunst, wetenschap, design en technologie hun krachten bundelen, komen ze tot prikkelende en wederzijdse inzichten. De beelden, gedachten en producten die eruit voortkomen verruimen zowel de kennis, de verbeelding als de toekomstperspectieven. Leve[n]de Kunst: ontmoeting tussen kunst, design en (micro)bio(techno)logie. Symposium over de bijzondere meerwaarde van interdisciplinariteit. Tentoonstelling met werk van kunstenaars, designers en wetenschappers.
The work of AnneMarie Maes makes the invisible visible. Her research has always been on the borderline between nature, art and science. She creates with a range of biological, digital and traditional media, including bacteria and other organisms. The choice of materials is a primary aspect of her artworks. The physical and aesthetic features of the materials she works with determine the forms of the individual sculptures, objects or textiles. Her artworks are appealing to touch and smell, but as well they attract the spectator in an aesthetic and visual way.
Ecological research inspired by the ecosystem of beehives
The Bee Agency installation is based on Annemarie Maes’ work on bee colonies and the threat faced by these “intelligent superorganisms” which respond to environmental influences as bio-indicators. The Belgian artist studies the close interaction between beehives and urban ecosystems while experimenting with a wide range of technologies. One example of this is her Intelligent Guerilla Beehive (an intelligent beehive made of microbial skin, designed to withstand external attacks) which responds to external environmental stimuli.
Brussels in SongEun: Imagining Cities Beyond Technology 2.0 engages in a social-political discourse that involves citizens and various interest groups on the following question, namely what constitutes a desirable smart city in an era of technological revolution? Contemporary cities are magnets that attract growing numbers of people, resources, ideas, opportunities and knowledge.
Ispirato dall'intelligenza, dalla complessità e dall'auto-organizzazione delle colonie di api, l'Intelligent Guerilla Beehive è un'installazione biologica (cioè una scultura costruita con materiali organici e utilizzando metodi di fabbricazione digitale open source come la stampa 3D) che fornisce agli spettatori un'esperienza visiva e audio artistica di attività all'interno e intorno ad un alveare. Le api sono bio-indicatori.
The hive mind: from echo-manipulation to eco-pollinization.
From 22th to 24th of November, an international group of artists will meet at the PIKSEL Festival in Bergen. Throughout concerts, installations, performances, workshops and presentations, artists will share artistic ways to look at bio-data and ecosystems. Buzzocrazy! The Piksel18 festival slogan points to the new era of “post-truth” based on appeals to emotion rather than policies and facts.
Stretching the truth can be seen as just part of a game. The post-truth affects how we make sense of the world around us.
In this exhibition more than 10 artists based in the city of Brussels are invited to reflect upon the question of what constitutes a desirable 'intelligent' city in times of digital ubiquity?
Through the work of the artists selected, the exhibition seeks to propose critical and creative visions leading to the conceptualization of more human and original cities in times of technological revolution.
Kruisbestuiving van Kunst en Wetenschap leidt tot nieuwe inzichten, zowel wetenschappelijk als artistiek. Technologie maakt nieuwe verbeeldingswijzen mogelijk. Dit symposium met tentoonstelling staat in het teken van deze symbiose. Kunstenaars en wetenschappers gingen samen aan de slag – duik mee in hun creatieproces.
Field_Notes // Ecology of the Senses is an art&science field laboratory at the Kilpisjärvi Biological Station in Lapland/Finland. Five groups work for one week in the sub-Arctic Lapland to develop, test and evaluate specific interdisciplinary approaches in relation to the notion of Ecology of Senses.
Art, New Media and Ecology After the Anthropocene.
The exhibition Eco-Visionaries is dedicated to the topic of ecological change and presents artistic responses to current challenges. It investigates new media, technologies and techno-scientific methods in the arts and their significance for the perception and awareness of the 'ecological.'
May 31st I give a talk on the Intelligent Beehive Project at the Hybrid Labs Symposium (Aalto University, Helsinki, 30/05 to 02/06 2018). Hybrid Labs aims to challenge the future of knowledge creation through art and science. Celebrating 50 years of Leonardo journal and community, the conference will look back into the history of art and science collaboration, with an intent to reconsider and envision the future of hybrid laboratories, where scientific research and artistic practice meet and interact.
The 8th edition of Hiperorgânicos - International Symposium on Research in Art, Hybridization, Biotelematics and Transculturalism, will take place between the 22nd - 27th of May 2018.
Hiperorgânicos is an idealization of the Nucleus of Art and New Organisms - NANO - coordinated by the artists researchers Prof. Dr. Guto Nóbrega and Profa. Dr. Malu Fragoso, headquartered at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro/UFRJ, city of Rio de Janeiro.
This year the chosen theme is “Ancestorfuturism”.
Beehave (curated by Martina Millà) is an exhibition project that reflects contemporary artists' growing interest in the survival crisis affecting honey bees and many other insect pollinators. Beehave also addresses the current debate about urban beekeeping, a practice that is not yet widespread in large cities in Spain. Accordingly, Beehave broadens the scope of the exhibition to span the entire city with ten urban interventions carried out by local and international artists.
The first edition of Nova XX will happen in Brussels from 9th to 30th December 2017. The main events include an exhibition of 9 installations by artists from Brussels and elsewhere in Europe, as well as a presentation of 7 Brussels Start-ups, and four presentations on different themes.
In total, the festival will showcase the work of some 16 female geniuses at the top of their respective hybrid fields of expertise. From art to start-ups, the works presented during the forum will all pay testament to the participants’ unique research process and desire to innovate.
Generation Z, Hacktivate the City - is an introduction to the Bio STARTS Lab (Science, Technology & the Arts) organised by Gluon. The Lab, led by Artist AnneMarie Maes and Biologist Tom Peeters will teach young peoplehow to set off on an interdisciplinary quest for solutions to big city challenges. The young ‘urban activists’ draw their inspiration from the nature in the city and use new digital technologies to come up with ideas, tools and prototypes for a more sustainable Brussels.
Let’s talk about your future. Person to person, as equals. Just like we’ve always been taught to do. But what if I weren’t a human being? What if I were a robot, a chatbot or a self-learning algorithm? Would you still want to talk to me, solicit my opinion? What would you think about me, and how would you come across to me? Would you confide private information to me? And speaking of entrusting—what would I have to do for you to be able to trust me? And what may I under no circumstances do?
The question that has haunted philosophers, politicians and poets since time immemorial is: how can we build a fair world? What would it look like? And what would it involve?
Equality of opportunity? Of income? Access to technology? Education for all? Or is it all simply down to geography or chance – and is it all totally out of our control? Are the words of the Universal Declaration as self-evident as they sound in the way in which society works?
Inspired by the recent report on Fairness by the Joint Research Centre, the European’ Commission’s leading scientific research and policy-supporting institution, the second Resonances exhibition, Fair/Fear collides scientific research with artistic investigation to provoke conversation and inspire answers.
The Tendencies exhibition unites contrasting narratives of some of the most interesting and intriguing voices in Belgian arts. Tendencies presents artworks that ‘use’ or ‘comment upon’ the latest evolutions in science and technology. Tendencies puts emphasis on works which question scientific and technological innovations as much as they incorporate them. It wants to open up the field of reflection relating to these links and highlight structural analogies between the creators of distinct and complementary fields. The title references the Nove Tendencije movements in the 1960s and 1970s in Zagreb, one of the first European initiatives that reflected upon ‘art as research’.
The CyberArts exhibition at the OK Center for Contemporary Art (Sept.7-Sept17, 2017) features the best works singled out for recognition by the 2017 Prix Ars Electronica. The world’s most coveted prize honoring creativity and pioneering spirit in media art has been awarded annually since 1987. Thousands of artists all over the world submit their works for prize consideration; a jury of experts from throughout the world evaluates the entries and selects the best. Once again this year, the CyberArts exhibition will spotlight an array of outstanding works of media art from all over the world.
Ecovention was a term invented by Amy Lipton and Sue Spaid in 1999 to refer to an ecological art intervention in environmental degradation. The Ecovention movement in art is associated with land art, earthworks, and environmental art, and landscape architecture, but remains its own distinct category. Many ecoventions bear tendencies similar to public works projects such as sewage and waste-water treatment plants, public gardens, landfills, mines, and sustainable building projects.
Artists associated with ecovention include: Joseph Beuys, Mel Chin, Agnes Denes, Helen and Newton Harrison, Ocean Earth, Robert Smithson, Alan Sonfist, and Mierle Laderman Ukeles, among others.
The exhibition at Siva Zona / Grey Area (Korcula) reveals a part of the artists’ long-term research towards the ultimate Intelligent Guerilla Beehive, a mobile shelter for homeless honeybees. This radically new device tackles a domain where human and non-human actors collaborate to maintain the resilience of an ecosystem in decline.
This exhibition is a recent solo exhibition of AnneMarie Maes, after group exhibitions in Brussels, Buenos Aires, Barcelona, et al. A new book of her work, entitled 'Alchemia Nova' (with texts by Luc Steels, Edith Doove, Armin Medosh and Darko Fritz and published by Mer. Paper Kunsthalle), will be launched on this occasion.
AnneMarie Maes is fascinated in the processes by which Nature creates form: How bees create honeycombs in the hive, how they self-organize into swarms, how plants grow and form geometric patterns, how bacteria and yeast cells collectively create material surfaces forming biofilms.
Realising Potentials: Arts-based sustainability science is a two-day workshop conceived as an experiential site for exploration and dialogue between the arts and sustainability science.
The workshop takes place at Barcelona (Spain), November 3rd-4th, 2016 at the Institute of Catalan Studies (Institut d’Estudis Catalans, IEC).
The atelier is set up as an Innovation Lab where new organic materials -bioplastics- will be studied and fabricated. Practical use of these vegetal and bacterially grown materials will be discussed on the basis of the case study the Guerilla Beehive. The atelier is directed by Anne Marie Maes, artist, beekeeper and herbalist.
The neo nomad project, curated by Basak Senova is an initiative of SAPAR CONTEMPORARY GALLERY + Incubator, New York.
Neo Nomad consists of a series of media exhibitions, screenings, and presentations. The project explores the potential aspects of “nomadism” by taking the current conditions and realities of migration, globalization and hyper mobility. The neo nomad project focuses on artistic researches and projects in the same frequency
‘Made@EU’ showcases the work of the artists who have been working on residency at Fab Lab Barcelona, 2016.
Selected artists are supported by five European institutions working in partnership on a project, funded by Creative Europe, that explores the relation of 3-D digital fabrication technologies to traditional art, craft and designer-maker processes.
With the installation The Raw and The Cooked, AnneMarie Maes researches the artistic possibilities of bioplastics. In her Laboratory for Form and Matter she studies the mechanisms by which nature operates and she investigates how she can use these processes to create her own organic materials. She experiments with a range of organic components and she measures their usability for potential art installations and design applications.
AnneMarie Maes is an artist and researcher. Her work incorporates sculpture, photography, video, installation and public participation. More recently, she founded a 'Laboratory for Form and Matter' to experiment with natural materials grown from fungi and bacteria. She engages with living systems in order to make the invisible structures and processes in nature visible.
BRDCST is Ancienne Belgique’s brand new indoor spring festival with a focus on musical limitlessness. To diversify this new festival the curators of BRDCST take a multidisciplinary approach. They bring together a pool of artists who feel strongly about artistic innovation, and they compose a program based upon a mix of music and fine arts exhibitions.
At the AB's old ticketshop, a charming house at Steenstraat 25, a pop-up Bee Bar is installed. The organizers invite AnneMarie Maes & the Brussels Urban Bee Lab to show the art installation 'the Ambition of the Territory', a project triggered by the universe of city honeybees.
31 January 2016, 3-6PM - SciArt Café at artlaboratory-berlin.org.
The iGEM team Berlin presents their fourth SciArt Cafe.
Under the main theme of "Programming Life - Good Code/ Bad Code?" we will hear scientists and artists working with bioscience and afterwards discuss topics of synthetic biology. Join us on the 31th of January from 3.00 - 6.00 pm at Art Laboratory Berlin. After four warm up talks at ArtLaboratory Berlin, we will start the discussion over food and drinks.
Renewable Futures
Conference in Riga, from 8-10 october 2015
The Renewable Futures conference aims to invent new avenues for more sustainable and imaginative future developments. It will shape new contact zones between traditionally separated domains – art and science, academic research and independent creative practices, sustainable businesses and social engagement in the 21st century. The conference of this year will focus on exploring the transformative potential of art in the post-media conditions.
Transformative Ecologies
exhibition
The exhibition features innovative art science works by Latvian and Belgian artists, who are envisioning sustainable future scenarios with regards to food and energy.
The artists have used innovative methods to create sonic, visual and 3D representations of various environmental and biological data collected during their long term techno-ecological researches.
With: Gints Gabrans, Rasa Smite And Raitis Smits, Martins Ratniks, AnneMarie Maes,
Gert Aertsen, David Debuyser, Voldemars Johansons, Janis Jancevics, Paula Vitola, Rihards Vitols.
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is a discipline within computer science concerned with creating computer programs that exhibit aspects of intelligence. Research started in the late nineteen fifties and has now matured to provide the computational foundations for the web and social media today (for example search engines or data mining). But AI research is more than practical applications. It has always aspired to tell us something about our own intelligence: how humans are able to see, hear, act, think, learn, and speak.
AI researchers are increasingly using artistic means to give expression to the fascinating ideas and methods coming from their own research, and artists have begun to employ...
The exhibition Bee Monitoring Devices and Curious Observations is the starting point for the presentation on the research and artistic work of AnneMarie Maes and the Brussels Urban Bee Lab at the Institute of Evolutionary Biology in Barcelona. The work of AnneMarie Maes, media artist and beekeeper, is already since more than six years based on a rigorous research into bees. AnneMarie Maes set up the Brussels Urban Bee Lab in 2009 and this artistic laboratory installed several instrumented beehives on garden roofs in the centre of Brussels. The artists and technicians of Brussels Urban Bee Lab designed sophisticated equipment to monitor and measure the bee colonies, process the...
The 2-year collaborative media art initiative A LABORATORY ON THE OPEN FIELDS is finishing with a distributed festival CONVERGENCE. Four different locations in Brussels are hosting ecological media works created during a larger experimental process. A daily guided walk on 23-24-25 April starting at 2pm connects OKNO, Tour&Taxis, Overtoon, and the Brussels Urban Bee Lab.
Collaboration works! 4 partner organizations, and 40 artists within a common program. Join them for ideal quiet afternoon city trip.
A custom made open source app and web environment, PVC is rendering the extended festival locations from Saint-Nazaire, Praha and Hranice, Brussels and the Atlantic Coast visible on the spot.
While public authorities are ranking cultural production down in their priority list, the economic practice of the fair is being challenged. Can the art market be combined with cultural innovation? Conceived as an assembly of international organisations, including galleries but also artist-run spaces, curatorial initiatives and other non-profit spaces, POPPOSITIONS aims to occupy an independent, critical position during Art Brussels. With its international presence growing every year, POPPOSITIONS has built a cutting-edge profile that is here to stay.
POPPOSITIONS 2015 will take place from the 24 - 27 April from 12:00 until...
The exhibition is dedicated to both city beekeeping and artistic projects involving bees. Beekeeping attracted the attention of artists from day one. City beekeeping a few years ago has become a popular pastime, and today we can see hives on the rooftops of cultural institutions, restaurants and shopping centers, or in city parks and gardens. One thing is shared among most city beekeepers: the desire to do things differently, and not with the primary goal to harvest as most of the honey as possible. In addition, in cities more than in the countryside various forms of community beekeeping are being established.
Urban Beeing....
The Invisible Garden is a large-size art installation in the exhibition ‘the Green Light District : the place of Nature in the city of Men’. The garden is a remake of the Edible Forest Garden, the Open Air Laboratorium created by the artist AnneMarie Maes on her rooftop in the center of Brussels. The Invisible Garden is a sitespecific project that reverses the relation between nature and art. The transitions between inside and outside, culture and staged nature, become fluid and transitory.
I ask questions about the current state of our ecosystems, about the use of green spaces in our cities, and I want to provoke a dialogue about the different elements that make up the physical reality of our urban landscape that is in a constant transformation.
Following the exhibition Fields (Riga, 2014), we were asked by Armin Medosh to contribute to a series on Kunstradio Vienna, produced by Elisabeth Zimmerman. The exhibition Fields showed works by artists, agriculturalists, designers, technologists and scientists that are truly transdisciplinary and blur the boundaries between different disciplines or fields in a very profound way, and on top are of a socially transformative character. These works now find continuation through on- and offline projects. This broadcast series entitled 'Kunst Fields' presents work by 6 artists who participated in the show and a 7th work by curator Armin Medosch. This work called Wild Ontologies looks at creatively...
'The Olfactory' is a travelling scent exhibition concept in a movable container. It aims to exhibit a widest possible range of Olfactory Art. Each exhibition displays only for 2 days, there are 33 exhibitions spread over 6 weeks.
The Olfactory resides on a fixed central spot at the Mad-Faculty, University College PXL in Hasselt and UHasselt (University of Hasselt) Belgium. From there, The Olfactory will travel to the Muhka Museum in Antwerp and the VUB (Free University Brussels).
The Olfactory is organized by Peter the Cupere -a visual artist working with fragrance- and gets the support of the Mad-Faculty Mad-Research, University College PXL and the University of Hasselt.
What is the outcome if work on novel ict - Information and Communication Technologies - is linked with artistic expression? This is the question asked by the ict art connect.study and the question raised during a series of participations in events of other ongoing activities in the field.
ict art connect.study is ran by iMinds and Artshare for dg connect - European Commission. The study aims at characterizing and connecting artistic communities of ict researchers at all levels. From this analysis, recommendations will be drawn for a dg connect strategy to engage more broadly...
Café Europa is a project initiated by Mons 2015, European Capital of Culture. With the theme ‘where culture meets technology’, it is the intention is to bring new technologies closer to the public at large. Café Europa appropriates the social qualities of a traditional café, but merges them with the creative opportunities coming along with new technologies. Café Europa is a multi-functional, architecturally flexible, mobile space that can be adapted to the needs of the local context as well as connecting other places in Europe with a similar nature into a creative network.
The Innovation Labs at Café Europa Riga are curated by the team of RIXC. The curators aim to shape new contact zones be...
For the Riga 2014 exhibition FIELDS I present the multi media installation FORAGING FIELDS.
Foraging Fields is composed of several artistic works, all documenting a specific part of the Bee Research Laboratory. The complexity of the installation illustrates the significant interaction of bee colonies and their surroundings on different levels.
More information on the installation is available from the Foraging Fields booklet. Details of the artworks can be found via the links below.
Annemie Maes gives a workshop for the students design and graphic design at the Luka school of art.
The scattering of seeds-lecture is addressing topics as artist collectives, local and international art networks and platforms for collaboration, as well as online collaborations between artists, international dissemination and collaborations between artists and scientists.
The importance of collaborative online tools as wiki's, print on demand, opensource databases and open servers philosophy will also be discussed.
Presented case studies are the City Bee Monitoring Project and the Urban Corridors Project as research interfaces towards sustainable cities of the future.
The exhibition Scientific Inquiries is taking place from november 7th, 2013 to december 7th 2013. The event is curated by Basak Senova on the occasion of the 20th anniversary of Koç University Istanbul.
The works on show all focus on art/science collaborations. AnneMarie Maes is presenting the Transparent Beehive Cabinet, an account of a year-long observation of and working with honeybees in several mobile laboratories in the city.
During the course of the preparations, invitations were sent to 6 Koç scientists to contribute with text, commentary, notes, or objects from their personal position. Many different scientific disciplines touch on b...
Winning Hearts and Minds, A project by Critical Art Ensemble, is a daily encounter at the 13th Documenta Festival in Kassel, Germany.
In this area, reminiscent in its remoteness of “free speech zones” recently established in the US (Guantanamo Camp X-ray, for example), a lecture takes place every day at noon, for the 100 days of dOCUMENTA (13). Lecturers can sign up through an “open call” system on critical-art.net. Selected projects can engage in whatever free speech they want. It takes place at a house at the far end of the Hauptbahnhof, close to the railway tracks.
This salon discusses the theoretical bases and ecological and technological foundations of Urban Corridors and cha...
In April, May and August 2013 Annemie Maes organized a three-part bee monitoring workshop at Valldaura Self Sufficient Lab in Barcelona. Prior to the event she developed together with Jon Mitchin and John Rees (at the Fab Lab Barcelona) several beehives, making use of Warré’s and OpenStructures principles to make them more sustainable.
They had equally been developing a sensor-equipped measuring device that tracks the temperature and humidity changes on the inside and outside of the hive and as such reveals how ecological factors affect the bees’ behavior.
Taking an ecological approach to observing patterns in time and space systems is a very current direction to tackle environmental issues. This discussion focuses attention on observations of an historical nature as well as considering emerging patterns in our individual and collective attitude to Nature, ecology and the environment. Recently, several projects – highly evolved in both concept and process- emerged. Some of these case studies are used as primary foci of exemplification in order to explain the dialectics between Humanity and the environment through artistic capture. These dialectics also bring into relation the significance and future implications of fledgling initiatives in regions w...
Open, O Sesami. Open, O Green. Open, O Fields. A chance meeting in the name of Green Rush.
This chance meeting on the occasion of composting the city/ composting the net launch at transmediale2013 brings together partners and projects of green rush. In 2009, Nomadisch Grün launched prinzessinnengärten at Moritzplatz in Berlin Kreuzberg, cultivated a wasteland into a vibrant, self-sustainable urban farming/gathering site. In 2012, a 'Let it grow' campaign calls for public support to stop the land from being sold by the Property Fund.
Alotof, A Laboratory On The Open Fields, is an okno (Brussels) initiative to develop framework and structures,
Annemie Maes is invited by Professor Josep Perello of the Universitat de Barcelona and the Barcelona Laboratori to introduce a series of workshops on Urban Beekeeping for artists and scientists.
The workshop offers the opportunity to work at the intersections of artistic, scientific and technological practices in the field of urban beekeeping. Urban bees are quality sensors of the city where we live but, how can we capture and decode all the information they provide? During these two days, we will build and install a kit of sensors in a hive at the Three Dragon...
Nature and culture; this has always been a tense relationship. Whereas culture was once meant to protect man from nature, we now have to protect nature from culture. In spite of all our ecological intentions, we even now consider that nature exists ‘for us’. Climate change, the world population explosion and diminishing stocks of many natural resources are putting increasing pressure on this anthropocentric attitude, but there is still no sign of any about-turn. Nature must in the first place be of economic use, and should furthermore provide us with a degree of aesthetic pleasure.
In the fifth Burning Ice, Kaaitheater is showing the work of artists inspired by the rising tension between nat...
Hortus is an interactive ecologic and economic installation in a garden, and a Salon where a discussion will take place about (im)possible futures. The salon sessions are at 12am and 5pm every day at the Erasmus house in English and/or in Dutch. Each session will have between one and 3 speakers and one moderator and will be recorded to be viewed on the website of Kaaitheater and prolong the discussion online. Two texts specially written for this Salon will reflect two hypothetical scenarios for two different periods: 2020 and 2084. Their structure is similar but their content suggests different political, cultural, environmental and social approaches to the same issues.
The Transparent Beehive installation was selected by OKNO to participate in the OpenHouseBrussels Festival.
For the first time in Brussels 24 artistic laboratories and alternative management offices have joined together to show their practices and research in an Open House event dedicated to both public and professionals.
Focusing rather on artistic research processes than on final products, these structures provide national and international artists with time, space and tools to develop their works. With Open House these multi-disciplinary organisations take the opportunity to strengthen their bonds and show once again that Brussels is more than ever a creative and dynamic artists’ city.
The O...
Time Inventors' Kabinet [TIK] is a collaborative experiment with time. For the last two years, a series of artists and thinkers have made an attempt to devise the future of an alternative and ecological time. This transdisciplinary project focuses on non-linearity and parallelism. All kinds of environmental information; be it a city, a field or beehive, can be transformed into sound and vision. Wind time maintains a distributed network that connects gardens in rural areas and cities, bringing them together in non-conventional relational databases, forming one long open green that has its own notion of time.
The TIK festival has rounded up the participants...
This two-day workshop discusses what can be done to facilitate a process to connect art and ICT and determines why this could make a difference. It tries to formulate questions that arise when art and ICT connect and then finds potential answers.
During the meeting scientists and artists from across Europe talk about their work connecting art and ICT, and their motivations and expectations for doing that. The event starts with presentations that take stock of ongoing collaborations, presentations from artists outlining their motivations, and from institutions that already have made dialogues between art and science part of their agenda. This helps to formalise the processes needed for creative...
This fourth edition of Burning Ice -'It's the economy, stupid!'- will be built up around the theme of economy. Climate change confronts us with the consequences of our actions. It turns our world-view with its endless growth completely upside down. Our civilisation appears to be underpinned by waste, excess and fundamental inequality.
The Signals from the South exhibition is organised by Pixelache festival in collaboration with MUU Gallery.
Pixelache Helsinki (2-5 April) is a festival of electronic art and subcultures, organised since 2002.
Signals from the South’ is an annual showcase of projects from ‘the South’ (South America, Africa, Asia). This year’s exhibition features work by Venzha Christ / Yogyakarta New Media Art Laboratory (Indonesia), Geraldine Juaréz (Mexico), Annemie Maes (Belgium), Vanessa Gocksch & Juan Carlos Pellegrino (Colombia).
How to save the world in 10 days?
Global warming, the financial crisis, famine, drought and overpopulation… The end is near, but don’t despair: artists and experts from different disciplines will launch proposals to save the world, put the threat in perspective or blow up the whole thing.
Well-aimed happenings, bold statements, bizarre turns, sophisticated utopias and biodegradable references.
Annemie Maes has made a documentary wall with pictures, videos, and interviews she gathered during her field research at Barefoot College. In this Indian community, illiterate grown-up women are technically trained so they can personally provide their village with sustainable energy wit...
This page gives an overview of all presentations related to the Urban Corridors project. It makes no distinction between media. A presentation can be a participation in a festival, in an exhibition, a workshop, a walk, a talk, ...
name: No2Pho, interactive installation, year start: 2005, year end: 2006, techniques: audio sources, network of senders & receivers, max msp, synthetic speech, text Gertrude Stein - Continuus Present
Voice networks and machine aesthetics: a research into synthetic speech combining litterature and philosophical content. A physical network and a virtual network. People and voices. Wireless headphones and 12 spatialized soundsources. People walk their traject through physical (empty) space and as such localisation data are produced. Synthetic voices are generated and frequency and pitch are modulated by the variable parameters of localisation and orientation. The...
name: Politics of Change project, short film, year start: 2009, year end: 2009, techniques: highdef video + sound, english spoken, subtitles Nl, Barefoot Solar Engineers
In MAHILA, the filmmaker steps between different worlds, going from West to East, from urban to rural surroundings. Her encounters with the experiences and observations of rural Indian women provoke reflection on the process of empowerment. In an artistic ethnography we see and hear how they are using education, technology and politics to redefine their destinies. As we trace the filmmaker’s memories we are taken into questions about story-telling. How are the women fighting to get their stories h...
name: the Politics of Change Magazine, magazine, year start: 2009, year end: 2009, techniques: print, networked stories
#01_on women empowerment and creative networks
An artistic research project driven by grassroots activism, eco-technology and networks of women to build integrated and sustainable relationships between people, their environment and technology.
My interest in the women Solar Engineers and the Mahila Samiti groups for women’s empowerment in Rajasthan comes out of a personal involvement that links art, women empowerment, ecology, technology and social engagement.
When I learned about the Barefoot College project, I was struck b...
name: the Peope Database Online project, database, year start: 1999, year end: 2001, techniques: database, found footage, public participation, networked stories
You can participate in the people database by clicking the tag 'read & contribute'.
Choose an avatar, choose a keyword, and drop your story. You can read the stories of other participants by constulting the database 'search the archive'.
name: Closed Circuit#3, interactive installation, year start: 2001, year end: 2001, techniques: audio/live, video-realtime, webcam, loop, inside/outside
"... You can see just a peep of the passage in Looking-Glass House, if you leave the door of the drawing-room wide open: and it's very like our passage as far as you can see, only you know it may be quite different on beyond. Oh, Kitty, how nice it would be if we could only get through into Looking-Glass House! I'm sure it's got, oh! such beautiful things in it!..." (from the complete works of Lewis Carroll - A wonderland of stories, nonsense and wit.)
name: Closed Circuit#2, permanent interactive installation in public space, year start: 1999, year end: 2000, techniques: audio, video, sensors
Closed Circuit # 2 is a sound installation realized on behalf of the Ministry of the Flemish Community in the income hall of the Boudewijn Building in Brussels.
By analogy with the iconic image of the clocks in international offices or hotels -displaying the real time of important cities-, the installation presents the real time in the cities of New York, Brussels and Tokyo in the form of their own city sounds. Brussels (0 hours), New York (-6 hours), and Tokyo (+8 hours) give together a lapse of twenty-four hours....
Title: Glossa (b/w); year: 2024; materials: tapestry woven on Dornier Jacquard machine with a range of organic fibers; dimensions: 170cm x 225cm; realized at B&T Textilia (Be)
Glossa is a woven interpretation of the multi-parts composed tongue of an insect. This work, executed as a woven jacquard tapestry, is based on a microscopic photograph of the tongue of a honey bee. Glossa is a close-up of the tip of the proboscis, the group name for the different parts of the bee tongue. Through a play with scale/size, the details lose their meaning and take on a new, abstract dimension.
Title: Salinas d'Addaia; year: 2023; materials: hot rolled steel, local red clay; 200cm x 100cm x 4cm
Salt marshes are unique ecosystems at the transition of land and sea. They harbour plants and animals adapted to cope with salt stress. Intertidal salt marshes occur along the edges of shallow seas with soft sediment bottoms where the tidal range is considerable, zones that are flooded regularly by the tides. The obvious coloration of the salt marsh is caused by its microscopic algae,
Title: Microbial Ancestors (pink); year: 2023; materials: tapestry woven on Dornier Jacquard machine with a range of organic fibers; dimensions: 170cm x 225cm; realized with Marjan Van Oeffelt at TextielLab Tilburg (Nl)
Microbial Ancestors (Topography of a Sensorial Skin) -the pink tapestry- is a woven interpretation of a Sensorial Skin. Its topographic view visualizes the ecology of the symbiotic organism composed of Acetobacter xylinum bacteria and Saccharomyces cerevisiae yeast cells and the several layers of cellulose woven by these bacteria to create the skin.
Title: Acuario con Acetobacter xylinum; year: 2023; materials: fermentation in process, bacteria and yeast in black tea medium, sugar, vinegar, glass container; dimensions: 99cm x 50cm x 30cm
In a large aquarium, a fermentation process is taking place. The generative process is in a constant state of transition. The creation of the Sensorial Skin reacts to variable invisible factors as temperature, humidity and the local enzymes in the water and the air. Every newly grown Sensorial Skin is thus the unique result of the specific site were it is grown, with its own metabolism and aesthetic specificities.
Title: Microbial Ancestors (orange); year: 2023; materials: tapestry woven on Dornier Jacquard machine with a range of organic fibers; dimensions: 170cm x 225cm; realized with Marjan Van Oeffelt at TextielLab Tilburg (Nl)
Microbial Ancestors (Topography of a Sensorial Skin) -the pink tapestry- is a woven interpretation of a Sensorial Skin. Its topographic view visualizes the ecology of the symbiotic organism composed of Acetobacter xylinum bacteria and Saccharomyces cerevisiae yeast cells and the several layers of cellulose woven by these bacteria to create the skin.
Title: Sensorial Skins; year: 2015-2023; materials: symbiotic organism of bacteria and yeast cells in medium, often with vegetal dyes; dimensions: variable;
Sensorial Skins are grown by bacteria during an acid fermentation process, the result of this action is called 'vegetable leather'. The Sensorial Skins undergo a visible metamorphosis due to the changing invisible factors as temperature and humidity specific to the location.
Title: Exoskeleton, topography of a second skin; year: 2023; materials: soil bacteria, rainwater. Discipline: photographs of an evolving artwork. Dimensions: lightbox 110cm x 72cm x 14cm
‘Exoskeleton, topography of a second skin’ are 2 lightboxes with photographs of the Winogradski experiment. The experiment researches what bacteria can tell us about the soil they live in. Soil samples (a highly diverse micro-ecosystem of soil bacteria and algae) were cultured for several weeks.
Poetry is at the hart of alchemy. Flowers of speech.
Microbial Ancestors, fermentation.
Every death is a birth and every ending is a beginning. Transmutation.
It’s moist and slimy with an acid smell of lively matter.
Since 2015, Anne Marie Maes has been developing organic material by fermenting bacteria and yeasts that leave behind a brownish vegetable leather once removed from their substrate. Expanding, curling, and hardening with the temperature or humidity in the air, these biofilms are called Sensorial Skins to emphasis their living and evolving nature.
Title: Pantone Alsace (Reading the Landscape); year: 2023; materials: organic fibers dyed with local plant pigments; dimensions: 375cm x 300cm; collaborative work with the pickers and collectors.
The work 'Pantone Alsace (Reading the Landscape)' is emerging from a meticulously scanned environment. It takes the form of a Pantone colour chart to present a local chromatic range. After several walks to collect plants and fungi in the Alsace region, pigments were extracted to dye the wool which was then woven to obtain a work that bears witness to the "colourful" richness of the regional landscape, offering us a new way of looking at the world.
Title: Microbial Ancestors (pink/organge/green); year: 2023; materials: tapestry woven on Dornier Jacquard machine with a range of organic fibers; dimensions: 170cm x 225cm each; realized with Marjan Van Oeffelt at TextielLab Tilburg (Nl)
A woven topographic view visualizes the ecology of a symbiotic organism. It translates the collaboration between Acetobacter xylinum bacteria and Saccharomyces cerevisiae yeast cells. The original Sensorial Skins were grown in a culture of fresh hibiscus tea for the pink, and campèche-colored tea for the orange. The tapestries offer a play of light shining through the lightly woven,
Title: the Large Loom / le Grand Métier; year: 2023; materials: brushed metal, cotton, wool, plant dyes. Performers: Nora Hendriks, AnneMarie Maes ; dimensions: 200cm x 240cm x 35cm.
The Large Loom / Le Grand Métier is a custom-built, two-by-two-meter sculpture in brushed metal. It is a perfectly functional weaving loom that is set in motion by the artist at key points during the exhibition at La Kunsthalle, thereby creating a visual portrait of the region.
‘Microbial Life’ focuses on the transformative power of soil bacteria. The installation shows the result of a scientific experiment named ‘Winogradski Columns’. Soil samples (a highly diverse micro-ecosystem of soil bacteria and algae) were cultured for several weeks. The sealed cultures were developing independently over time,
Title: Please Touch; year: 2022; materials: Latex, natural pigments, hemp. Costumes for 'a Bee is a Bee is a Bee' performance
a Bee is a Bee is a Bee: a durational performance for the Palais the Tokyo, Paris. Commissioned by Vittoria Mataresse, in collaboration with Guerlain Paris and supported by CWB|Paris-hors-les-murs.
Title: 1. Smell of the Hive; year: 2019; 2. BeeLove2C and Bee Tokyo 9; materials: essential oils, wax, nectar, propolis, pollen and dead bees, Perfume creation by Guerlain Paris, flacon design by Maoro Bultheel (2022) and research by destillation at the at Open BioLab Brussels (2019)
The video Variation Games is a culmination of the observations carried out between 2017 and 2018 on the community behavior of bees. The images and sound, recorded with an infrared camera and a microphone installed inside the hive, reveal the democratic
Title: a Bee is a Bee is a Bee: 2022; discipline: Durational Performance; Performers: Maoro Bultheel, Elke Van Der Kelen, Sofie-Joan Wouters; Video & Stills: Margarita Maximova; Sound: enaposs; Duration: 4 hours Production: Palais de Tokyo
a Bee is a Bee is a Bee: a durational performance for the Palais the Tokyo, Paris. Commissioned by Vittoria Mataresse, in collaboration with Guerlain Paris and supported by CWB|Paris-hors-les-murs.
At Palais de Tokyo, Anne Marie Maes offers an immersive experience. With an artistic and scientific approach, she transforms the spaces of the Palais into a laboratory.
Laminaria is a website documenting and comparing marine ecosystems in Europe.
Laminaria operates on the border between sapiens and fauna. It outlines possible futures in a new bio/techno/natural world, a universe that is at once terrestrial and aquatic, a prerequisite for future coexistence.
Title: Theatrum Algaerium. Durational Performance with the Sea; year: 2021; materials: performers, sea, algae, metal structures, rituals; Duration: 2 hours.
Early in the morning and late in the evening, between low and high tide, the Theatrum Algarium rises from the sea. Metal frames hold the fluttering weeds.
Title: Alien Intelligence: Lightboxes. SEM microgrpahs, B/W prints of honeybee parts and pollen; year: 2018; materials: duratrans prints, brushed steel, translucent and transparent plexiglass, led-lights; Dimensions 26cm x 26cm x 10cm.
Title: Disappearance, sculpture in progress. Slow transformation process by bacteria; year: 2021; materials: tangerines, lemons, metal plinth, glass box, plexi glass boxes, bacteria. Dimensions 40cm x 40cm x 80cm.
‘Disappearance’ focuses on change and temporality. Five plexiglass boxes are filled with lemons and tangerines that are slowly eaten away by bacteria, until nothing is left. In this degradation process, the organic matter progressively transforms and reduces, till the point of disappearance.
Title: Guerrilla Beehive- Sculpture & prototype for a speculative beehive with biological pollution sensor; year: 2017-2019; materials: organic materials & 3D prints. Electronics, solar panel, Raspberry Pi. Dimensions variable.
The ‘Guerrilla Beehive’ is a sculpture & prototype resulting from a speculative research project. Conceived as a mobile shelter for swarming honeybees, it combines in a radical way smart materials, biomimetic forms and biotechnology.
Title: L’Origine du Monde II; year: 2019-2021; materials: cyanobacteria bacteria (Synechocystis), agar agar, water. Hand blown glass cells, metal structure, sea sand . Dimensions variable (structure ±400cm x 80cm x 130cm).
Poetically representing extensive research into the potential of cyanobacteria and microalgae, L’origine du monde is composed of a metal structure on which glass cells, filled with cyanobacteria, are growing as they were young, sprouting buds on a tree in springtime.
Title: Territorial Flow - Mixed material sculpture; year: 2021; materials: Latex, organic pigments, beeswax. 200cm x 65cm. Metal structure, dimensions variable.
Over a dark metal structure, a soft flow of latex, natural pigments and beeswax mix to create a topographic map. The shapes are reminiscent of the bees’ foraging territory.
A selection of bacterial grown skins, microbial cellulose, in different sizes and thickness. Structures are variable. All colored with 100% naturel vegetal dyes, grown in the Brussels Urban Open Air Lab.
Title: Play with Squares – floor sculpture; year: 2021; materials: organic materials and waste debris. Fibers, herbs, pigments. Each textile ± 75cm x 75xm. Dimensions of composition variable.
Play with Squares is a floor sculpture composed of organically created textiles. They are arranged on a low wooden plinth, and their warm colours are derived from grasses, herbs, vegetables and fruits I grow in my rooftop garden/open-air laboratory. I use organic debris and natural additives to make these colourfield paintings, which evoke to a tranquil, almost meditative contemplation.
Assemblage made with organic materials. Microbial cellulose skins grown by Acetobacter xylinum and yeast cells, bioplastics with red algae, horse hair. Drawing. Dimensions variable ( 200cm x 120cm)
Title: Connected Open Greens, elements of a garden; year: 2020; materials: different stages of building a garden: from (soil) bacteria to the production of organic materials made from plants, fruits or other. Dimensions variable. Workshops can be part of the artwork.
A project developed for SHARED GARDENS, an exhibition at Magasins Généraux, from June 27 to September 13, in Paris at Pantin on the banks of Ourcq Canal. Focusing on the ecological and social transition, it is aimed at rethinking our ways of living together and our relationship with the environment, starting on a local scale.
Title: SLOW METABOLISM, Living object; year: 2020; materials: cyanobacteria, nutrient gel, glass, stone
The electric green veins running through the bottle are colonies of cyanobacteria. They are slowly evolving and little by little they are colonizing the nutrient gel. They are autotrophe organisms, which means that they provide in their own food. They obtain their energy through oxygenic photosynthesis. They consume CO2 and they release oxygen, similar as plants do.
Title: L'ORIGINE DU MONDE, 40 glass cells filled with cyanobacteria, year start: 2019-2020; techniques: bioart, cyanobacteria, glass, silicon tubes, pumps
L’origine du monde is an artistic representation of my research into the possibilities of cyanobacteria and (micro) algae.
The installation shows a strongly enlarged bacterial chain made from glass cells. Every cell is filled with cyanobacteria producing realtime photosynthesis.
Title: ALIEN INTELLIGENCE II, 25 lightboxes 26cm x 26cm x 10cm, year start: 2018; techniques: SEM microgrpahs, B/W prints of honeybee parts and pollen on duratrans - 26cm x 26cm; microbial cellulose grown by Acetobacter xylinum bacteria and yeast cells and coloured with vegetal dyes, 26cm x 26cm; materials: brushed steel, translucent and transparent plexiglass, led-lights.
The work consists of a series of SEM (Scanning Electron Micrographs) printed on Duratrans and presented in lightboxes. The black/white micrographs are mixed with lightboxes in which I present colourful microbial cellulose skins (cellulose fabrics made by bacteria and colored by vegetal dyes).
name: Wax Beehive, sculpture, year start: 2014, year end: 2014, techniques: organic beeswax, silicon mould, blender designs, thanks to: Joeri Bultheel, Emmanuel Chessa
We have to think about new materials, inspired by nature. We can experiment with a list of raw materials (list without limitation): corn starch, brown sugar, glutinous rice, coconut fibers, hemp, mushroom mycelium, silk, coffee ground, linen, cotton. We can e.g. cut old natural woven carpets with the lasercutter. We can dye raw materials with color extracts from plants as indigo (from the Indigofera tinctoria) or orange from the Calendula officials.
We can make hives out of flexible solar panels,...
Title: SCANNING ELECTRON MICROGRAPHS, large format prints, year start: 2018; techniques: SEM microgrpahs, B/W prints on Hahnemühle paper - 162cm x 215cm; artist: AnneMarie Maes;
From the series of Scanning Electron Micrographs: intimate and compelling images on micro-organisms and their (urban) ecosystems, and how these organisms and environments are affected by the era of the anthropocene.
In my practice, the concept of making and producing the (light)sculptures and textiles is as a form of study. The artistic process happens in layers and is linked to the action of subtracting and adding. The concept of scale is very important. The volume of an object and its relationship with nature (micro/macro) are essential elements of my work. The choice of materials is a primary aspect of my artistic research. I always work with natural and organic components, and...
Title: Scale Models IGB; year start: 2016 - ongoing; techniques: sculptures ± 111cm high; techniques: wax casting, 3D printing, plaster casting; Materials: wax, latex, epoxy, bacteria, organic dyes, electronics, solarpanel, 3D printed PLA, seeds, aquarium sand a
A collection of small sculptures, developed during the research of the Intelligent Guerrilla Beehive project (2016-2019). The objects are presented in clear plexi boxes, each 13cm x 13cm x 13cm, on black or white sand. Each piece is unique. Materials: wax, latex, epoxy, bacteria, organic dyes, electronics, 3D printed PLA, seeds, aquarium sand.
Title: Untitled (green and orange wall textile), year start: 2019; techniques: bioplastics with algae and orange peels, material science studies; artist: AnneMarie Maes;
Untitled (green + orange wall textile). This piece is made out of fresh and salt water algae collected at the Venice Lagoon, at the Skibotn Fjörd in Norway and they are mixed with microalgae collected on a city rooftop. The orange textile is made from Tangerine skin peels. The work can be presented with or without backlight.
Title: Intelligent Gurrilla Beehive v.2, year start: 2018, year end: ongoing; techniques: bacteria, algae, electronics, material science studies; artist: AnneMarie Maes; collaboration: Open BioLab Brussels; Hybrid Forms Lab VU Amsterdam
The project 'Intelligent Guerrilla Beehive 2.0' is researching the renewable energy that can be extracted from algae, to replace the solar panel as an energy source to power the sensors.
'What if' scenario: the environmental information of the foraging fields around the beehive is collected by the sensors in and around the hive, and its data is stored and processed in the cloud.
name: Intelligent Guerrilla Beehive for ElbBienen Project; Sculpture, Art in Public Space, the Hamburg Machine, Hamburg; year start: 2018; year end: 2019; size: 130 x 130 x 150; materials: wood, metal, wax, bee colony, sensors & electronics, processing & streaming
Honey bees use caves, rock cavities and hollow trees as natural nesting sites. The nest is composed of multiple honeycombs, parallel to each other, with a relatively uniform bee space. It usually has a single entrance. Western honey bees prefer ...
name: Untitled Test Piece (tribute to Eva Hesse); mixed media work; year: 2019; size: 600mm x 630mm x 5mm; materials: bioplastics, bacteria, vegetal dyes, flat metal washers, cotton
Untitled (Yellow, a tribute to Eva Hesse) is part of a series of works with bioplastics in different constallations: multiple layers, a range of organic pigments and testing combinations with different non-organic materials as well introduction and development of bacteria on the bioplastic matrix.
Title: INTELLIGENT BEEHIVE 2.0, metal movable construction, LCD screen with mediaplayer+sound, film Variation Games, Intelligent Beehive sculpture made from Bacterial Cellulose and Bioplastic, electronics, solar panel, camera; year start: 2017-2019; techniques: speculative project, sustainable beehive, cyanobacteria, biomaterials, honeybee behaviour observation
the Guerrilla Beehive 2.0 is a speculative project in which the sensors are powered by a cyanobacterial biofilm. The bacteria grow a dense biofilm on the outer shell of the sustainable beehive. The bees are scanning the health of the environment while foraging. When the bees return to...
name: Glossa and Black Debris; lightboxes; year start: 2016, year end: 2016; size: 106 x 72 x 14, each; materials: scanning electron micrograph on duratrans, plexiglass, brushed metal, TL lights. Pedestal in blank metal, 72 x 60 x 30
From the series of Scanning Electron Micrographs: intimate and compelling images on micro-organisms and their (urban) ecosystems, and how these organisms and environments are affected by the era of the anthropocene.
name: Light Table with Skins; sculpture; year start: 2017, year end: 2018; size: 150x150x80; materials: bacterial grown skins, vegetal dyes, plexiglass, metal, TL lights
A selection of bacterial grown skins, microbial cellulose, in different sizes and thickness. Structures are variable. All colored with 100% naturel vegetal dyes, grown in the Brussels Urban Open Air Lab.
name: Visible, Invisible; textile works; year start: 2017, year end: 2018; size: 150x300 each; materials: micro-organisms, organic matter, bacteria and cotton
In my practice, the concept of making and producing the (light)sculptures and textiles is as a form of study. The artistic process happens in layers and is linked to the action of subtracting and adding. The concept of scale is very important. The volume of an object and its relationship with nature (micro/macro) are essential elements of my work.
name: Bacterial Mantarey; sculpture; year start: 2018, year end: 2018; size: 65x65x120; materials: micro-organisms, organic matter, bioplastics and metal
This organic sculpture builds upon a body of research that focuses on biofilm formation; it is using the aggregation of bacterial colonies as a metaphore for the communication between a diversity of neighborhoods in cities. The biofilm as a city and the city as a biofilm.
A biofilm is an association of micro-organisms in which microbial cells adhere to each other on a living or non-living surface. Biofilm formation is a cooperative group behaviour. The bacteria communicate via quorum sensing
The scientific research of the project Sensorial Skin [for an Intelligent Beehive] focuses on turning the skin into a biosensor. I believe that working with cyanobacteria is a promising path to achieve the objectives regarding the responsive skin, because cyanobacteria are auto-trophe and they can live in colonies and react as such.
I will investigate in how far a living bacterial sculpture can function as a CO2 reducing and oxygen generating object for use inside the home.
The development of this object will be based upon my previous work with cyanobacteria, I will implement the knowledge that I gathered during my biotech-project ‘Sensorial Skin’ (development of a pollution sensor).
name: The Intelligent Guerilla Beehive, project, year start: 2016, year end: 2017, techniques: working with micro-organisms and organic matter, creating artworks with biochemistry, combinations of high end bioresearch with craft techniques and digital media; mixed media installations in the overlapping domain of art & science
The Intelligent Guerilla Beehive is a bio-art installation 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.
Bees are bio-indicators. They reflect the health of their surrounding ecosystem as well...
name: Genesis of a Microbial Skin, year start: 2016, year end: 2017, techniques: bacteria and yeast cells; Acetobacter xylinum, Lactobacillus plantarum, Deinococcus radiophilus, living bee colonies, electronics ; resulting are mixed media installations in the overlapping domain of art & science
'Close reading of the Genesis of a Microbial Skin' gives a condensed overview of my notes (relating to the Intelligent Beehives research with a focus on SKIN) between 2012 to 2017. The project is about growing Intelligent Guerilla Beehives from scratch, with living materials - as nature does. Biomimesis is used as a starting point for incubating ecological thinking on matter and form. Different sensorial qualities of microbial and vegetal SKIN are being examined in terms of usefulness for sensing environmental threaths and for monitoring the wellbeing of the bee colonies.
name: Variation Games, year start: 2017, year end: 2018, techniques: video account of 1 year intensive bee monitoring - 21'50"; author/director: AnneMarie Maes; editing: Margarita Maximova; Sound supervision: Joeri Bultheel
VARIATION GAMES are games where the set of rules is constantly adapted by the players.
The bees act as transmitters in an interconnected web of bio-intelligent agents. They construct a bioremedial beehive and create a symbiotic environment for exchange with specific bacteria.
name: The Laboratory for Form and Matter, work in process, materials science research, micro-organisms, year start: 2016, year end: ongoing, techniques: micro-organisms, bacteria and yeast cells, translucent plexiglass, metal, light, dimensions: variable
My experiments with smart materials have been brought together under the label 'the Laboratory for Form and Matter'. Here I study the processes by which nature operates and how I can use these processes to create my own intelligent materials. I experiment with a range of organic components and I measure their usability for art installations and design applications.
name: Bee Agency, year start: 2017, year end: 2018, techniques: Scanning Electron Micrographs of bee-parts and pollen; author: AnneMarie Maes; technical help: Alexander Lutz (VUB); large formats, printed on b/w Hahnemühle rag paper
‘Agency’ is the capacity of an actor to act in a given environment. Since Darwin, it is clear that flowers and bees engage in an evolutionary race. The honeybee is a complex insect with numerous sensorial features which are matching perfectly with the demands of sensual plants.
name: Portfolio Works, year start: 2015, year end: 2017, techniques: mixed; author/director: AnneMarie Maes; editor: AnneMarie Maes
AnneMarie Maes is a multi-media artist who has been studying the tight interactions and co-evolutions within urban ecosystems. In the open-air lab on the rooftop of her studio, she created an experimental garden and has been keeping bees in self-designed beehives, equipped to bring out hidden structures in the life of the colony. Her “field notes” provide an on-going source of inspiration for her artworks.
name: PH3 - Future Archaeology, work in progress; year start: 2017, year end: ongoing, techniques: micro-organisms & bacteria, organic materials, digitally fabricated objects, electronics ; dimensions: variable
In my Laboratory for Form and Matter I work with a range of biotic and abiotic elements. I view my lab as an open environment for experimentation, a space for contradiction, criticism and evaluation. I combine organic components such as vegetal matter, propolis and chitine, with living systems such as fungi and bacteria to create artifacts for the future. My micro-organisms grow biofabrics and I research how these membranes can be enhanced and made...
name: series 1/3 of Scanning Electron Microscope photographs, archival prints, year start: 2016, year end: 2017, techniques: micro photography, organic samples, prints on Hahnemühle paper, framed, dimensions: 26cm x 26cm each
They are everywhere and they can be perceived as quite the alien intelligence; six-legged, with their numerous eyes, capacities of motion and sensation so different from our own. No wonder science fiction has been inspired by insects. But also other fields, like robotics as well as network design. Insects are more than creepy-crawly bugs;
name: Sensorial Skin, photograph, year start: 2016, year end: 2016, techniques: macro photography, prints on Hahnemühle paper, dimensios: 80cm x 80cm and 80cm x 56cm
Sensorial Skin is a series of macro photographs of microbial skins. The skins are grown by Acetobacter xylenum bacteria and yeast cells in a medium of green tea and sugar. The micro-organisms create a subtle biofilm on the growth medium. Once the film is harvested and dried, it feels like a second skin and it has the strength and impermedable properties of leather.
name: Liquid Blockhead, installation - dimensions variable (floor elements: ± 150cm x 100cm x 100cm), year start: 2016, year end: 2016, techniques: mirror, bricks, microbial skin, wax and natural latex, plaster, 3D printed objects
The installation 'Liquid Blockhead' presents a collection of digitally fabricated objects as 3D-printed hexagons, 3D-printed ceramics of seedpods, and objects made from natural materials as felt, wax and rubber.There is a boxball-pendulum, a shelter turned into a plaster blockhead and stressballs made from little wax pellets.
name: Collection, accrochage, year start: 2016, year end: 2016, techniques: micro-organisms, bacteria and yeast cells, 3D prints in ABS and ceramic, wax sculptures, paper works, honey batteries, dimensions: variable
An accrochage of objects forthcoming from New Materialism. A synthesis of natural phenomena. A weird collection of objects. Experiments with digital and organic components, nature inspired algorithms (e.g. neural networks and deep learning), micro-organisms as a basis for computation and built-in efficiency of natural processes. The purpose is to make an artistic indicator of the biological condition of the foraging areas, via plant & pollen parts...
name: Guerilla Beehive, sculpture (35cm x 30cm x30cm) scale model for def. cork Guerilla Beehive, year start: 2016, year end: 2016, techniques: highdensity foam, bio fabric, vacuum, 3D printing, electronics (solarpanel, camera, raspberry pi, cables)
The design of the Guerilla Beehive is inspired by nature. The content (± 40 liters) responds to the nest-needs of a bee colony living in the wild, and the mobile architecture makes it easily deployable on different spots in public space, hence its name: the Guerilla Beehive.
name: Black Circle - White Circle - Original Skin, 3 sculptures (40cm x 34cm x15cm), year start: 2016, year end: 2016, techniques: Sensorial Skins (micro-organisms), lightbox, dimensions: depend on quantity of lightboxes in the installation
The Skins are experiments in developing new materials for making sculptures. They are a surface for encounter between the several vegetal and bacterial materials and site for experimentation. A place where material and patterns change into meaning, a tactile experiment that offers an entry to explore touch and feel, and that studies the specific qualities of each component.
name: the Ambition of the Territory II, photographs, year start: 2016, year end: 2016, techniques: Scanning Electron Microscope photographs, b/w prints on Hanemühle Rag Photo paper, 72cm x 52cm
'The Ambition of the Territory' is a series of works that visually investigates the traces of memory and the communication in a honeybee colony.
The relatively simple nerve system of the honeybee is able to learn quickly. It forms multiple memory traces, including that of a long-term memory.
name: the Ambition of the Territory I, sculpture & photographs, year start: 2016, year end: 2016, techniques: beeswax, rubber, latex, felt, size of the work: 100cm (W) x 40cm (D) x 10cm (H)
'The Ambition of the Territory' is a series of works that visually investigates the traces of memory and the communication in a honeybee colony.
The relatively simple nerve system of the honeybee is able to learn quickly. It forms multiple memory traces, including that of a long-term memory.
name: the Transparent Beehive, sculpture, year start: 2013, year end: ongoing, techniques: honeybee colony, plexiglass, wood, steel, sensors, microphones, webcams and streaming technology, realtime audio, data processing, size of the work: 175cm (H) x 95cm (W) x 75cm (D)
The Transparent Beehive is a living sculpture in the form of an observation beehive made from plexiglass, wood, aluminium and steel. Inside is a living bee colony that has access to the outside world through a plexiglass pipe. The Transparent Beehive was installed for the first time on a Brussels rooftop connected to an urban garden laboratory and has since been shown...
name: TransparentBeehive_3-Channel video installation, project, year start: 2013, year end: 2015, techniques: working with living bee colonies, year-round observation, sensors, electronics, digital fabrication; Transparent Beehive, mixed media installations in the overlapping domain of art & science
The Transparent Beehive is a living sculpture in the form of an observation beehive made from plexiglass, wood, aluminium and steel. Inside is a living bee colony that has access to the outside world through a plexiglass pipe. The Transparent Beehive was installed for the first time on a Brussels rooftop connected to an urban garden laboratory and has since been shown in various art contexts. It has helped to produce a variety of art works including sound works, visual images, and bee artifacts.
name: Flags, Grids and Sensorial Skins, year start: 2016, year end: ongoing, techniques: microbial skins, organic materials, metal, plexi
A series of works made with cellulose skins.
There are cut-ups, geometrical works, experiments in combination with a range of organic materials, skins colored with vegetal dyes as avocado pits & peels, stinging nettles, eucalyptus bark, cochineal bugs or hibiscusflowers. Works in metal...
name: Bees as Architects, custom made computer with a selection from the Bee Laboratory video database, year start: 2011, year end: ongoing, techniques: DIY hardware & electronica, Bee movies
‘Bees as architects’ is the starting point for the work with wax and propolis. Bees can be seen as living 3D printers that reach an extreme grade of mathematical perfection when building a honeycomb. Through the centuries physics and mathematicians have wondered how a bee colony reaches this result. We want to take up the challenge to work just as constructive with 3D printers and organic materials such as chitosan, sugar, propolis or ...
name: the Spider and the Bee, year start: 2015, year end: 2015, techniques: 2 lightboxes: 107cm x 71cm, duratrans photographic print mounted on plexi
This work is inspired by The Battle of the Books, a work of Jonathan Swift. It especially draws meaning from the fable of the Spider and the Bee. Diverse knowledge is a precious good. No art pour l'art, but art embedded in life.
The Battle of the Books is the name of a short satire written by Jonathan Swift and published as part of the prolegomena to his A Tale of a Tub in 1704. It depicts a literal battle between books in the King's Library, as ideas and authors struggle...
name: Bee Material, 3D printed objects built by the bees, year start: 2015, year end: 2015, techniques: 3D prints (Moebius), Bee Colony, dimensions: 40cm x 40cm x 30cm (without pedestal an d plexiglass box)
A Moebius-strip was printed in 3D (transparent resin) and put in a beehive. The colony, in full expansion, started to built waxcomb in the 3D structure. As such, a hi-tech 3D print is combined with a natural 3D print, a good example of biomimesis, advanced technology inspired on nature.
Similar experiment was executed with a paper truncated octahedron-shape. There, the bees started eating the paper and moved away the wax.
name: Infrared Observation Movies, Bee Colony Study, year start: 2015, year end: ongoing, techniques: custom made monitoring device, Raspberry Pi computers, infrared camera's, infrared lights, a range of different sensors
By displaying the installations and findings of the research at art/science exhibitions, the OKNO URBAN BEE LAB team gives a critical comment to spark the discussion on Urban Ecologies and the disappearance of the Honeybees, hereby emphasizing the importance of experimentation and continually evaluating what is possible in a close collaboration between scientists and artists, and between interdisciplinary fields...
name: SmartSkin research, year start: 2015, year end: ongoing, techniques: biomimesis, 3D printing, sculpture, modelling, drawing
The 3DPrint-project Bee Material, Bees as Architects serves to continue and deepen the research of the Brussels Urban Bee Lab. Bees can be seen as living 3D printers that reach an extreme grade of mathematical perfection when building a honeycomb. Through the centuries physics and mathematicians have wondered how a bee colony reaches this result. AnneMarie Maes and the Brussels Urban Bee Lab want to take up the challenge to work just as constructive with 3D printers and organic materials,...
name: Scaffolded Sound Beehive, year start: 2015, year end: 2015, techniques: Warré Beehive model using open fabrication in fablab, wood, CNC cutter, laser printer, 250cm H x 80cm W x 80cm D, thanks to: Vincent Malstaf and Balthazar de Tonnac, Givan Belá, Bill Bultheel, Yacine Sebti
The Scaffolded Sound Beehive is an immersive installation in the form of a beehive. The viewer puts his or her head inside and experiences a visual and auditory artistic interpretation of hive activity.
The Scaffolded Sound Beehive is part of a series of ecological instrumented beehives leading towards a fully biocompatible intelligent beehive. T...
name: Guerilla Beehives Study, year start: 2012, year end: ongoing, techniques: biomimesis, 3D drawings, scanning electron microscope, plaster, plant material, beeswax, 3D prints in ABS, polyamide and ceramics
I want to populate cities with a network of Guerilla Beehives. These beehives should offer shelter to bee colonies 'in the wild' - rather than force bees into artificial apiaries. The bee colony should be able to thrive without the help of a beekeeper. Guerilla-beehives are intended for pollination and thus preservation and remediation of biodiversity.
Is it possible to produce Beehives that are as aesthetic and as...
name: l'Orto Invisibile, year start: 2014, year end: 2015, techniques: 15 photographs (250mmx380mm each) total size 1m80 x 1m25 on dibond + databases on server with texts, movies and images
L'orto Invisibile is dedicated to the documentation of the large-scale installation 'the Invisible Garden'.
During 3 months, an indoor ecosystem (the Invisible Garden in the Buda Factory) is observed in a naturalist way and the monitorings are scrutinously documented in several databases. I am particularly interested in how the life style of an organism (be it a plant or an animal born in the indoor garden) fits in with the other organisms...
name: the Bee Activity, year start: 2014, year end: 2014, techniques: long term bee colony monitoring, 8 channels, max msp, collaborators: billy bultheel
Soundbees, anywhere & everywhere is an audio piece by AnneMarie Maes and Billy Bultheel.
AnneMarie Maes and Billy Bultheel started to develop the audio piece from the 8-channel field recordings made in the broodnest of the experimental Warré-beehive set-up (see drawing).
The sound-behaviour of the bee colony was recorded from june 10 2014 and the sound-experiment is still ongoing. For the Kunstradio piece, the artists started to work with the recordings from the longest ...
name: the SEM photo series, year start: 2013-aug, year end: 2014-sept, techniques: dissected honeybees, pollen grains, scanning electron microscope, duratrans on plexi, steel lightbox
The work is a series of 8 lightboxes, representing microscopical photographs of bee-parts and pollen grains. The photos are made with the high-end Scanning Electron Microscope (SEM), which is used for scientific research and can display greatly enlarged images of objects, also in 3D view. The study (in collaboration with scientists from the VUB) lead to a remarkable series of microscopical photographs. Honeybee parts (proboscis, antennae, legs,...
name: The Invisible Garden. Naturalistic Observations and Hidden Memories. installation, year start: 2014, year end: 2015, techniques: rooftop garden construction, lava substrate, plants, grow lamps, LCD screens, video, audio - collaborators: Balthazar de Tonnac and Vincent Malstaf (code and electronics), Billy Bultheel (sound processing), AnneMarie Maes (garden design & realisation, video, opengreens database design)
The Invisible Garden / l'Orto Invisibile. Naturalistic Observations and Hidden Memories. is a large-scale art installation in the exhibition the Green Light District : the place of Nature in...
name: Connected OpenGreens, publication, year start: 2009, year end: 2010, pictures and texts: annemie maes techniques: independent publishing
A 4 volumes publication, covering the actions from 2009 to 2010 in the Open Air Lab 'Connected OpenGreens'.
The Open Green project blends organic and technological matter into one and the same nature. Through analogue and digital means we do long term observations on the growth, blossoming and decay of plants and insects submitted to natural elements such as wind, sun, rain and pollution in an urban context.
name: Bee Monitoring, installation, year start: 2014, year end: 2014, techniques: bird cage - bee nest, webvideo, pandora open source video database, thanks to: Jan Gerber, Sebastian Lütgert
Bee Monitoring. The raw material is an 8 TerraBytes stream of images. During 10 months I studied a colony's development from scratch: from a late-spring swarm till the new spring one year later. Two (2) webcams filmed continuously in the beehive, at 15/fps, day and night. The videofiles were accelerated and compressed into 1 file of 11hours 35 minutes.
For the FIELDS exhibition in Riga, this long videofile was presented in a box with a peephole, in respect to the private ...
name: Bee Monitoring, installation, year start: 2014, year end: 2014, techniques: honey, aluminum, copper, lemon, thanks to: Ralf Schreiber
Why honey batteries and how to make them? I did some experiments with honey batteries: the honey as electrolyte gel, the copper- and aluminum foil work as electrodes, thin coffee filter paper as isolator. It works fine and the generated current lights up some connected LEDS for a while.
Since honey contains electrolytes, in the form of acids and minerals, it exhibits varying degrees of electrical conductivity. Experimenting with honey batteries is a nice way to learn about possibilities of powering the sensors in the ...
name: Guerilla Beehives, sculptures, year start: 2014, year end: 2014, techniques: mobile pinewood structures, plaster, Japanese cocospalm, organic beeswax, thanks to: blauwberg
I want to populate cities with a network of intelligent ‘guerilla-beehives’. These beehives should offer shelter to bee colonies 'in the wild' - rather than force bees into artificial apiaries. The bee colony should be able to thrive without the help of a beekeeper. Guerilla-beehives are intended for pollination and thus preservation and remediation of biodiversity.
I imagine a world where biological fabrication replaces traditional manufacturing and thus where new sustainable bee...
name: Flightroutes part#2, installation, year start: 2014, year end: 2014, techniques: urban farm, apiary, garden community, microscopic analysis, thanks to: David Leyssens, Eva Van Velzen, Gaël Loicq, Gil Gram, Matthieu Regout, VUB chemical engineering laboratory
As media-artist and beekeeper I am studying since 2009 the co-evolution between city honeybees and urban ecosystems. In many industrialised nations the bee colonies are threatened, often because of the state of ecology in the bees’ foraging areas. It is remarkable to see how a bee population functions and evolves very much in accordance to the human activities we are developing around them: gardening an...
name: Flightroutes part#1, installation, year start: 2014, year end: 2014, techniques: Raspberry pi's, honeybees, live streaming of monitoring data, thanks to: Balthazar de Tonnac, Bob Motté
Bees are a means for exploring how humans interact with and understand nature. As an urban ecologist, I study the link of the honeybees to the environment. The bees' overlapping foraging areas create ecological corridors throughout the city. By hacking rooftops and transforming them into urban gardens, I am experimenting with new forms of sculpting the public space. It generates a form of site-specific art intended to provoke change. Ecological corridors in urban environments ...
name: the Connected OpenGreens, database, year start: 2012, year end: ongoing, collaborators: annemie maes, danielle roberts, balthazar de tonnac, techniques: public art project, database, public participation
Can the gardens’ evolution be controlled, generated, enhanced or imagined in artworks? Does the fusion of natural and artificial matter produce new organisms, new environments, new forms of nature? Can technology animate nature and vice versa?
The Open Green is an artificial environment, a hybrid of nature and culture. The harvest is about scraping data of any kind from the garden and using it for organic ánd media applications.
We store the data of...
name: the Transparent Beehive Cabinet, book, year start: 2013, year end: 2013, techniques: book, print on demand
The Transparent Beehive Notebook gives an overview of the Transparent Beehive Project. It describes in words and images the intense process of Bee Monitoring and the close collaboration with numerous colleague artists, scientists, engineers and beekeepers. The relation bees and flowers is an evident one and is never far away in this notebook. In an artistic way and starting from hands on experiences as a beekeeper, I give an account of the building of monitoring systems and their implementation in the beehives at the open field labs. Working with...
name: the SEM photo series, year start: 2013-aug, year end: 2013-sept, techniques: dissected honeybees, pollen grains, scanning electron microscope
This work is a series of photographs made with the high-end SEM microscope. During 2 months I was invited to work at the chemical engineering laboratory of the Vrije Universiteit Brussels (VUB) to carry out research on city honeybees and their relation to the urban environment. As well the honeybees, as the pollen grains the bees were bringing back from their foraging flights, were closely inspected under the SEM microscope.
name: Totem Beehive, architecture object, year start: 2013, year end: 2013, techniques: CNC machine, laserprinter for grid, thanks to: Jon Minchin, Jonathan Reese, Fablab Barcelona
To monitor the bees in a non-intrusive way we are building Intelligent Beehives. These are hives that are augmented with sensors and sensory processing algorithms that analyse the quality of pollen and propolis as well as the behavior of the bees in order to monitor the state of the ecology in the surrounding areas. In a first research phase, the people's hive of Abbé Warré was adapted to the grid of the Open Structures project. The new Warré-hives are a collaboration between OKNO Br...
name: bees - webcam 365 days, year start: 2011-may, year end: 2012-april, techniques: honey bee colony, 2 webcams, 2 temperature sensors, 1 humidity sensor, 1 Co2 sensor, 1 combined temperature/humidity sensor outside
The Bee Monitoring project probes deeply within a network of ICT-enhanced beehives. Between may 2011 and april 2012, a complete cycle, from the awakening till the hibernation of the bee population, was recorded in a continuous stream of pictures, sound and sensor data. All this information is readily available online for beekeepers, scientists and other artists, offering an opportunity to study the bees as bio-indicators.
Two...
name: bees - webcam 365 days, year start: 2011-may, year end: 2012-april, techniques: honey bee colony, 2 webcams, 2 temperature sensors, 1 humidity sensor, 1 Co2 sensor, 1 combined temperature/humidity sensor outside
The videos bees-webcam 24hours and bees-trail are generally presented in a 3 channel video installation together with the bees-webcam 365days video. All 3 videos give an artistic survey of working with an observation beehive. The beehive is enhanced with different sensors and with 2 webcams inside.
The video bee-trail renders the timelapse in the beehive by showing the trail of honeybees...
name: the Transparent Beehive videos, year start: 2012-may, year end: 2013-april, techniques: honey bee colony, 2 webcams, 2 temperature sensors, 1 humidity sensor, 1 Co2 sensor, 1 combined temperature/humidity sensor outside
3 channel video installation representing the monitoring of the Transparent Beehive from beginning of may 2012 to the end of april 2013. The Transparent Beehive was set up in the Drying Room, the laboratory connecting to the okno rooftop garden in the center of Brussels. The fragments in the videos were filmed over the time of the season on regular intervals. Click the images to play the 3 videos together.
Presentation of the Connected OpenGreens database in installation setup. A miniature garden in a rusty metal table becomes alive with a close reading by a microscope. The image is magnified and projected on the wall, people can sit and meditate whilst being absorbed by the life projection.
The work was presented on the international conference 'Growth in art, society and culture', organized within the framework of the project TIK (Time Inventors’ Kabinet) and as an accompanying p...
name: Traveling through OpenGreens, essay, year start: 2012, year end: 2012, writer: annemie maes, techniques: first published in the publication Time Inventors' Kabinet
A pertinent question in ecological research is: Can artists make translations between biology, entomology and technology?
Don’t expect a balanced answer to this issue. This topic is a source for a long debate, one that has to be conducted collaboratively among the larger group of Time Inventors. Our shared work can become a common investigation into time relations within biological and circumstantial ecologies, through the lens of aesthetics.
name: the Laboratory for Form and Matter, project, year start: 2016, year end: ongoing, techniques: working with micro-organisms and organic matter, creating artworks with biochemistry, combinations of high end bioresearch with craft techniques, mixed media installations in the overlapping domain of art & science
The Laboratory for Form and Matter is a research project into artistic practices in the post-digital and post-media era. It is situated at the intersection of biology, ecology, technology and contemporary culture. The research is fed by my interest in bacteria as a medium for artistic expression and by a certain fascination for natural structures and...
name: the Bee Laboratory, project, year start: 2009, year end: ongoing, techniques: honeybee colonies, urban gardens, observation technology: sensors, contact microphones, webcams, streaming on open city network
The Bee Laboratory project monitors the behaviour of honeybees in urban surroundings. Beekeepers, scientists and artists examine the bee colonies in our rooftop gardens, our open air laboratories. We study the distributed intelligence of the honeybees : their behaviour, ecology and sociobiology. We monitor the bees and beehives with all kinds of eco-technology and we study the colony as a community. We research the interaction between the different c...
name: Connected OpenGreens, project, year start: 2008, year end: ongoing, techniques: urban gardens, local communities, bee colonies, communication technologies, observation technologies
Inspired by the flight routes of city honeybees and looking at where they are going and what they are bringing back, I am setting up the Connected OpenGreens project. I see Connected OpenGreens in urban environments as a new medium of social sculpture, a Gesamtkunstwerk that relies on the creative participation of many. Connected OpenGreens are ephemeral living structures in the form of green spaces connected through animal life, such as bee colonies. They...
SENSORIAL SKINS + WOVEN BY NATURE is een tweedelige tentoonstelling die doorgaat bij PILAR (huis voor kunst en wetenschap, VUB) en bij iMAL (Internationaal Centrum voor Kunst en Wetenschap in Brussel).
De twee tentoonstellingen tonen complementair werk waarin de samenwerking tussen micro-organismen en mensen centraal staan.
name: Algae Research, year start: 2019, year end: 2021, techniques: study of micro¯o algae, (cyano)bacteria and Lichen in the Venetian Lagoon, the Adriatic Sea and the North Sea ; focus on observing biodiversity and monitoring of climate change processes, R&D of new materials, natural pigments
This research project is in line with my previous work that combines art and science to reconnect people with living nature. I want to stimulate wonder, respect, and care for living beings so that humanity as a whole refocuses its life styles on creating a sustainable world
name: L'Origine du Monde, year start: 2019, year end: 2020, techniques: study of a cyanobacterial biofilm as a Sensorial Skin ; pollution sensor, green monitoring technology, resulting in a mixed media installation / overlapping domain of art & science
1. The project
It is by now well accepted that the ecosystem that sustains our human life is under great threat. One of the threats is the survival of the honeybee on which we crucially depend for pollination. My long-term Intelligent Beehive project researches sustainable solutions on the edge of art and science. Its goal is a double one. The inside of this bespoke beehive [Fig.1] offers...
name: Research on Weaving and New Materials, year start: 2019, year end: ongoing, techniques: weaving with organic materials: bioplastics, microbial skin, algae, plant fibers, ... ; R&D of new materials, natural pigments
Weaving is one of the oldest cultural techniques, older than agriculture and writing. Even in nomadic cultures, textiles ensure survival: they extend the function of the skin and make it mobile, by the garment as well as the wall which protect against wind and weather, but also regulate the exchange with the environment.
name: Sensorial Skin - Anabaena, project, year start: 2019, year end: ongoing, techniques: working with micro-organisms and organic matter as algae, lichen and radiolaria; creating artworks with biochemistry; combinations of high end bioresearch with craft techniques and digital media; mixed media installations in the overlapping domain of art & science
De installatie 'L'Origine du Monde' (werktitel Anabaena) brengt een artistieke en esthetische visie op het proces dat aan de grondslag ligt van het leven op aarde, nl. fotosynthese door algen en de daarbijhorende productie van zuurstof, waardoor ons universum veranderde van een zuurstofarm naar een zuurstofrijk ecosysteem en daardoor de evolutie volop in gang zette.
name: Genesis of a Microbial Skin, year start: 2016, year end: 2017, techniques: bacteria and yeast cells; Acetobacter xylinum, Lactobacillus plantarum, Deinococcus radiophilus, living bee colonies, electronics ; resulting are mixed media installations in the overlapping domain of art & science
'Close reading of the Genesis of a Microbial Skin' gives a condensed overview of my notes (related to the research on Intelligent Beehives and with a focus on smart materials, e.g. microbial skin) between 2012 to 2017. The project is about growing Intelligent Guerilla Beehives from scratch, with living materials - as nature does. Biomimesis is used as a starting point...
name: The Intelligent Guerilla Beehive, project, year start: 2016, year end: ongoing, techniques: working with micro-organisms and organic matter, creating artworks with biochemistry, combinations of high end bioresearch with craft techniques and digital media; mixed media installations in the overlapping domain of art & science
abstract:
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...
name: The Sound Beehive Experiment, project, year start: 2013 year end: 2015, techniques: working with micro-organisms and organic matter, customized observation device; green technology; electronics; mixed media installations in the overlapping domain of art & science
The Sound Beehive Experiment monitors the development of a bee colony on the basis of the sounds it generates. For this purpose, we developed a beehive that is equipped with sensors, microphones and cameras. We made sure that this equipment is not hindering the bees in their daily action. The Sound Beehive is installed in our field laboratory on a rooftop in the Brussels city centre.
name: the Transparent Beehive, sculpture, year start: 2013, year end: ongoing, techniques: honeybee colony, plexiglass, wood, steel, sensors, microphones, webcams and streaming technology, realtime audio, data processing, size of the work: 175cm (H) x 95cm (W) x 75cm (D)
The Transparent Beehive is a living sculpture in the form of an observation beehive made from plexiglass, wood, aluminium and steel. Inside is a living bee colony that has access to the outside world through a plexiglass pipe. The Transparent Beehive was installed for the first time on a Brussels rooftop connected to an urban garden laboratory and has since been shown...
name: 'The Variation Games' year start: 2017, year end: 2018, techniques: video; an artistic edit of the material gathered during the B-observation years; video, audio, sensor data, SEM micrographs, Infra-red photography; living bee colonies, bacteria and organic matter; part of mixed media installation
Agency is the capacity of an actor to act in a given environment. Variation Games are games where the set of rules is constantly adapted by the players.
De film Variation Games is gemaakt vanuit een ethologisch standpunt. Een tiental jaren observeerde ik de gedragingen van bijenkolonies ‘bottom-up’ doo...
name: politics of change (poc), project, year start: 2007, year end: 2010, techniques: local communities, international networks, sustainable solutions
Politics of Change (PoC) is an artistic researchproject that documents the contribution of small communities to the construction of a more balanced society. POC is a collective work where artists, activists and ecologists, economists, educators and anthropologists want to initiate collaborative dialogues to research ideas and solutions which support decentralised structures, diversity and community development.
The project involves not only public discussion, but an extensive mapping and documentation of these...
name: No2Pho, project, year start: 2005, year end: 2007, techniques: interactive sound installation, public participation, max msp, crickets networked microcontrollers
No2Pho -from noise to voice and from voice to music- is an artistic research project investigating the behaviour of language in its many appearances: textual, sonic and visual, as well as gestural or body language. How do these disparate elements relate to each other and how do they organize within a system which includes human and computer as a sender and a receiver [and vice versa]?
As a generative sound installation No2Pho plays with a connected set of elements. It is composed of dissonant...
name: essential emptiness, project, year start: 2002, year end: 2004, techniques: collaborations, public participation, networked stories with self portraits
Peopledatabase/essential-emptiness is een multimedia project met een focus op representatie. Vijf vrouwelijke videokunstenaars worden uitgenodigd een audiovisueel zelfportret te realiseren. De portretten maken deel uit van een interactieve installatie. De theoretische 'constructie' van een identiteit wordt in vraag gesteld door middel van een technische audiovisuele 'deconstructie'.
De analoge video-zelfportretten vormen de basis voor een digitale verwerking waarin tijd, ruimte en publiek de variabelen...
name: the People Database Archive, project, year start: 1998, year end: 2008, techniques: found footage, public participation, online database, networked stories
The People Database archive is considered as a meeting place for discourse, ideas and action.
The leading thread is the collection of passport photographs. Used as a mirror, they provoke an answer given by artists, philosophers, musicians, writers and other interested participants.
The site of Thurn & Taxis, in the context of the exhibition Here & Now, lends itself perfectly as a social structure for this cultural exchange. The archive-in-residence will call into question an interdisciplinary investigation...
Anne Marie Maes is a multidisciplinary artist with a background in botany and visual anthropology. She lives and works in Brussels. Her practice combines art and science with a particular interest in ecosystems and alchemical processes. She works with various biological, digital and classical media, including living organisms. In doing so, she focuses on the process and creates the ideal conditions for a self-generating art. On the roof of her studio in Brussels, she has created a field laboratory and experimental garden where she works with insects and bacteria, studying the processes that nature uses to create forms. For many of her projects, she collaborates with fablabs and university...
Since 2009, Okno is researching the co-evolution between city honeybees and urban ecosystems in its OpenGreens and Bee Monitoring programs. Bee colonies are now 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.
The research program surveys in an artistic way the multiple...
In April, OKNO organized a two-part bee monitoring workshop at Valldaura Self Sufficient Lab in Barcelona.
Prior to the event some of the Fab Lab Academy students had been building several beehives – one of which will be put in OKNO’s rooftop garden – making use of Warré’s principles and the OpenStructures system to make them more sustainable.
They had equally been developing a sensor-equipped measuring device that tracks the temperature and humidity changes on the inside and outside of the hive and as such reveals how ecological factors affect the bees’ behavior.
The Valldaura interns had been using material found in the surroundings to create a natural structure that will offer coolness a...
The project develops a Collective Awareness Platform for peer-to-peer urban food systems, called P2P Food Lab. The platform supports urban gardening, collective decision making, citizen science, and knowledge creation for all aspects of urban food.
A P2P Food Lab integrates open greenhouses, sensors, DIY processing boards, telecommunication networks, pattern recognition, statistical analysis, phone apps, wikis, and visualization tools. The platform uses social media for the bottom-up organization of cooperative activities and the gathering of knowledge. The project develops viable economic models and paradigms for governance based on participatory democracy and self-organization and incorporates...
Can Valldaura, located on the border between city and forest, between technology and nature. It houses the Self Sufficient Labs of Barcelona, working with local business, cutting-edge technology, leading academic institutions and grassroots Permaculture activists. The project reaches out to anyone wanting to explore the dynamic edge created as these different worlds collide. And to those inspired by the idea of studying the interface and interactions of urban and natural landscapes, to develop ecologically designed systems that have the stability of nature while still providing the daily needs of the Valldaura community and leisure and resources for the local population.
A workshop on the monitoring...
La Molina, a nice ski resort in the Spanish Pyrenees, is a great place to join workmeetings and sports.
We brainstormed on the P2P Food Lab and the Intelligent Beehive projects, enjoyed homecooked local food specialities and tried out sledging and langlauf.
We discussed a few possibilities to design a complex system for measuring the temperature in a beehive while following the bee-nucleus in winter:
first hand diagram for thermistor...
https://fieldliberation.wordpress.com/
Wij zijn Europese burgers van alle windstreken, beroepen, leeftijd en geslacht, en hebben deelgenomen aan de “grote aardappelruil” op 29 mei 2011 in Wetteren. Sommigen waren effectief aanwezig, anderen hebben elders informatie verspreid over deze openlijke en geweldloze actie of gingen akkoord met deze actie.
Met zijn allen wilden we duidelijk maken dat we geen genetisch gemanipuleerde aardappelen nodig hebben; er zijn immers al gezonde en goedkope aardappelvariëteiten beschikbaar die bestand zijn tegen de aardappelziekte.
Met onze actie wilden wij de politiek aanklagen, die ongewenste genetisch gemanipuleerde organismen uit het laboratorium - waarvan de g...
This workshop offers the opportunity to work at the intersections of artistic, scientific and technological practices in the field of urban beekeeping. Urban bees are quality sensors of the city where we live but, how can we capture and decode all the information they provide? During these two days, we will build and install a kit of sensors on a hive from the Three Dragon Castle, in Parc de la Ciutadella to obtain data from the inside and outside of the hive. Later, we will analyze and visualize data from a scientific and artistic point of view.
This first meeting aims to be the beginning of a community process among people looking for a sustainable city and committed to multidisciplinary and...
Today we no longer have the right to pretend that we command a unique position
from which we can view the truth about the world.
We must learn not to judge different areas of knowledge, culture, or art,
but to combine them and to establish new ways of coexistence with those
who enable us to meet the unique demands of our time.
Ilya Prigogine & Isabelle Stengers, Man’s New Dialogue With Nature,1979Urban ArtFarm: g...
bee monitoring technology
The word ‘beehacker’ has been entered into the lexicon of popular culture. A beehacker has been defined as:
(noun) A beekeeper who uses digital tools and technology to help monitor and manage a collection of hives.
Also: bee hacker and —beehacking.
[flashvideo filename=https://so-on.annemariemaes.net/SO-ON/bees/techbees.flv height=320 width=576 image=https://so-on.annemariemaes.net/SO-ON/bees/techbees.jpg /]
... monitoring the bees in the transparant beehive, sept.2012what can we monitor?
Which sensors do we need for it? And Where do we have to integrate them?
visual: webcams inside hive (infrared) or outside behind windo...
What is the taste of your neighborhood? Sweet, sour or a bit rancid?
Did you ever eat flowers out of your back yard garden?
What about growing your own food in city rooftop gardens?
Are you familiar with guerilla gardening, wild food foraging or short chain economy?
Visit us during the streetmarket of the Vlaamse Steenweg where we are presenting our OpenGreens Ecological Art Project. Taste your neighbourhood, and enjoy the fresh okno honey, collected...
Okno collaborates with Sideways to animate a walkshop on edible plants in Brussels.
Annemie Maes and Nathalie Hunter are both artists and herborists. They will take the particpants on a 2-day journey.
On Saturday September 1st they will walk with a group of participants through the urbanized environment of Brussels, starting from the forest of Laerbeek until the green oase of the city farm of Parc Maximilien. Together they will track edible plants, collect, name and archive them in a herbarium.
On Sunday 2 September, the collected plants will be treated and made into products. Which products depend of the found plants. This could be drying plants for infuse-mixtures, till developing macerates...
GREEN CORRIDORS AS SOCIAL SCULPTURE is a new project by OKNO. It builts upon the researchdata which are gathered in the OpenGreens. During Documenta 13, the project will be introduced by Annemie Maes at a salon hosted by the Critical Art Ensemble.
The salon takes place sunday july 8 at 1pm, in a house at the far end of the Hauptbahnhof Kassel, close to the railway tracks. It discusses the theoretical bases and ecological and technological...
Seeds and the City: a dive into Brussels OpenGreens
The synonyms for an OpenGreen are many :
the experimental Hortus, the OpenAir Laboratorium, the Vivarium, the Kabinet of Wonders, the Meeting Place. But all OpenGreens are zones where culture and nature overlap, and where locals play with a diversity of solutions to make the city greener and their life more sustainable.
OPEN stands for openness, collectivity, experiment, bottom up, DIY, networks of creative people.
GREEN stands for nature, ecosystem, natural processes, biodiversity and biological clocks.
What experiments link urban farmers, city beekeepers, eco-artists, herbalists, mushroom raisers
and city foragers? What interests...
Thymus
Als imker is de reden voor mijn interesse voor Tijm tweeledig. Enerzijds ben ik aangetrokken door (warme) mediterrane kruiden en hun medicinale werkingen, anderzijds is Tijm via de inhoudsstof Thymol één van de belangrijkste leveranciers ter bestrijding van de varroamijt - de belager bij uitstek van de (gezondheid van de) honingbij.
Tijm geurt prettig en aromatisch. De botanische naam van Tijm, Thymus, verwijst daar ook naar: die is herleidbaar tot het Griekse woord 'thymon' dat 'geur' betekent of 'geur geproduceerd door verbranding'. Dat laatste voert terug naar oeroude rituelen om de plant te gebruiken in reukoffers.
Ook bij het balsemen speelde Tijm vroeger een rol. B...
As part of a continuing ecological media art program, two practical workshops deal with environmental sensing. First Jonas Z. (SK/PL/NL) is building up an automatic water control system for the rooftop garden. Then we look into further ways of monitoring the beehives as part of a larger artistic research project. Both workshops are happening in the OKNO rooftop gardens. For participation please contact us.
1. A water management...
Aan het Justitiepaleis van Brussel verzamelde donderdag een tachtigtal sympatisanten van de beklaagden in het GGO-aardappelproces. Onder hen bevonden zich onder meer europarlementslid Bart Staes (Groen) en filosoof Lieven De Cauter.
Deze actievoerders kwamen zich vrijwillig aanmelden om ook te verschijnen als beklaagde in het GGO-aardappelproces. Dit proces is zeer omstreden omdat de elf beklaagden die opkwamen voor een duurzamere landbouw momenteel een jarenlange celstraf boven het hoofd hangt.
dewereldmorgen.be
Winning Hearts and Minds, one of two projects by Critical Art Ensemble, is a daily encounter in which individuals can engage in whatever free speech they want. It takes place at a house at the far end of the Hauptbahnhof, close to the railway tracks. In this area, reminiscent in its remoteness of “free speech zones” recently established in the US (Guantanamo Camp X-ray, for example), a lecture takes place every day at noon, for the 100 days of dOCUMENTA (13). Lecturers can sign up through an “open call” system on critical-art.net. OKNO submitted following :
GREEN CORRIDORS AS SOCIAL SCULPTURES
In the spirit of Joseph Beuys, this salon discusses how art can be relevant again f...
Nature and culture; this has always been a tense relationship. Whereas culture was once meant to protect man from nature, we now have to protect nature from culture. In spite of all our ecological intentions, we even now consider that nature exists ‘for us’. Climate change, the world population explosion and diminishing stocks of many natural resources are putting increasing pressure on this anthropocentric attitude, but there is still no sign of any about-turn. Nature must in the first place be of economic use, and should furthermore pro...
Climate Change is one of the greatest challenges of the 21st century. For the eleven arts organisations making up the IMAGINE 2020 – Art and Climate Change network, 2020 is a realistic date to work towards for making changes necessary to stabilise the climate and secure a sustainable future.
Art should provide a physical and imaginary space where people can take a step back, away from the corporate, the commercial and the educational, to exchange and engage with each other. It can address and involve more targeted audiences, such as young people, in playful yet serious ways. And above all it can create a positive energy and momentum for change through a sense of common purpose and hope.
So what can we do? Be bold? Make statements?
— The value of art is neither predictable nor calculable.
— Art is not consumption. A work of art does not become scarce when it is 'used'. Therefore economic laws do not apply to art.
— Art is not a matter of supply and demand. The market can only demand what is already known. What the public wants can therefore never become a creative or artistic factor.
— Art is discipline. It demands dedication of both artists and audiences.
— The artist should not take part in competitions. Undermine competition by looking at both the weakest and best things of each other and join in to formulate something completely different.
— Pragmatic solutions are always second best.
— If you apply for something and you need to fill out a form, first change the form to accommodate the work of art you have in mind, then fill it out.
— If you care for something, create yourself the conditions in which to develop it. Don’t adapt your ideas to time frames, formats and procedures imposed by institutions and managers.
— Formatting leads to monocultures. Life and evolution rely on diversity.
— A cultural field without artist-run organizations is unhealthy. Distrust artist communities that rely on the already existing institutions. Also distrust governments that claim that art is important, but subsequently fail to recognize artist initiatives.
— Art is not meant for ‘target groups’, art is for everybody.
en
The text entitled Slow Art is the result of discussion, reflection and collective writing, carried out by a group of people as part of the Open House team. It is a starting point, an invitation to think collectively about artistic practice and how we organize it in the here and now. "Slow" is our matter of concern. Equivalent toSlow Science or Slow Food, it makes a case against the product oriented and economic supremacy of the neoliberal society we live in.
In the context of the TIK festival (Time Inventors’ Kabinet) we host a round table THE RAW AND THE COOKED on urban agriculture and other bottom up solutions for future cities. What is the commitment of the people behind these ecological projects and communities?
Diverse topics will be discussed :
urban voids, open source, DIY, appropriation of space, guerilla gardening, water, food sovereignty, GMO, information, sharing of knowledge, bio diversity, (city) ecology, community building, urban planning, urban agriculture, the food chain between the city and the countryside, bio-corridors, ... and many more --- and what art has to do with all these initiatives.
The 'format' for the round table d...
Bee observation Installation : stories from the Drying Room
In “The Bee Archives or Stories from the Drying Room” the city honeybees are the main performers. The sonification of the bees' activities creates a real-time subtle soundtrack for the life in the hive. An OpenStructure observation beehive displays the organisation of the community and the collective decision making both among bees and artists.
The basic idea was to make ...
A long story, the bee arcHive stories. A book beeHive that over time transformed into an OpenStructures bee arcHive. A subtle sonorisation of the life ij the hive.
Yesterday afternoon and night we've transfered young bees from 3 different hives into the sculpture hive. Late, in the evening, we've brought them a beautiful queen with some more adult foraging bees. They were all very exited. Flying around, bumping into each other and into the glass.
The...
L’agriculture urbaine, c’est quoi au juste? Une oxymore ou une réelle possibilité de transition? Comment concilier l’espace urbain avec l’agriculture en ville? Quels sont les projets d’agriculture urbaine présents à Bruxelles?
Pour nous éclairer, différents acteurs issus du monde universitaire, institutionnel, associatif ou artistique présenteront tout au long de la journée différentes initiatives d’agriculture urba...
Growing Food for the Hungry City is an OpenGreens project that researches the possibilities of Urban Agriculture and the green role of the future city. How do contemporary cities deal with the food security? What is the motivation of the do-ers, the collectives of citizens? How do they organize the green temporary zones, autonomous and bottom up? Do these sustainable cities trive on new food politics, supported by a democratic and eco-minded community engagement?
This project researches the thread of Cpuls - continuous productive urban landscapes - along the canal, connected by the colonies of city honeybees.
The High Fens (Hoge Venen), were declared a nature reserve in 1957. It's a plateau region in the province of Liège, in the east of Belgium.
The reserve is ecologically rich part of Belgium, covered with alpine sphagnum bogs both on the plateau and in valley basin. The bogs, which are over 10.000 years old, with their unique subalpine flora, fauna and microclimate, are key to the conservation work of the park.
The heathers and turf moors ...
[flashvideo filename=https://so-on.annemariemaes.net/SO-ON/films/tik/praha.flv height=254 width=448 image=https://so-on.annemariemaes.net/SO-ON/films/tik/praha.jpg /]
Microgarden installation in the exhibition 'On a different Soil'
Time Inventors' Kabinet presentation, Praha - november 2011.
Patterns are everywhere in nature. Where does this order and regularity come from? It creates itself. The patterns we see come from self-organization. Whether living or non-living, scientists have found that there is a pattern-forming tendency inherent in the basic structure and processes of nature, so that from a few simple themes, and the repetition of simple rules, endless beautiful variations can arise. From soap bubbles to honeycombs or delicate shell...
Rembert Dodoens (1517–1585) was a Flemish physician and botanist, also known under his Latinized name Rembertus Dodonaeus. He is best known for his herbal Cruydeboeck (more precisely: Cruijdeboeck, as the title is printed on the title page), written in old Flemish and published in 1554.
A few years later, in 1557, a French translation of this work appeared, made by Carolus Clusius: Histoire des plantes. A...
Dat honing de eigenschap heeft om bacteriën te doden, is al eeuwen lang bekend. De zoete stof wordt gesmeerd op wonden met als doel infecties tegen te gaan. Deze volkswijsheid klopt. ‘De antibacteriële werking van honing is al wel aangetoond’, stelt Kwakman, die op 1 juli hoopt te promoveren. ‘Waarom honing die eigenschap heeft, was niet helemaal duidelijk.’
Honing lijkt eigenlijk helemaal niet zo’n geweldig middel tegen bacteriën. Al die suikers, dat zou een eldorado moeten zijn voor de micro-organismen; voedsel volop. ‘Dat is niet zo’, zegt Kwakman. ‘De suikerconcentratie in honing is ongeveer tachtig procent, veel te veel voor bacteriën. Alle soorten leggen in onverdunde honing het loodje d...
We participate in the international BEE DOC project with 2 colonies of our apiary (colony#1 and colony#2). The BEE DOC comprises a network of eleven partners from honeybee pathology, chemistry, genetics and apicultural extension aiming to improve colony health of honeybees.
The BEE DOC will empirically and experimentally fill knowledge gaps in honeybee pests and diseases, including the 'colony collapse...
Fotosynthesis in 2 steps: from the anorganic elements H2O and CO2 (water and carbondioxide) the chloroplasts in a plant build organic matter via the energy of the sun. In the first step ATP (adenosine triphosphate) and NADPH2 are created; in a second step this ATP is used to free energy (->ADP+P+energy) to create glucose (C6H12O6) en oxygen (6O2). It's a balance of anabolic and catabolic reactions - the (anorganic) fluids go up (water, minerals) and the organic matter (glucose, starch) goes down to the roots of the plant where it is used for its growth or stored as future nutrients.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plant
Cellular respiration is the...
Time Inventors’ Kabinet - eco.conference #05
On a different soil. Growth in art, society and culture
annemie maes - okno - brussels - (lecturer)
Praha - 9/10 november 2011
Seeds and the City: a dive into Brussels OpenGreens
The synonyms for an OpenGreen are many :
the experimental Hortus, the OpenAir Laboratorium, the Vivarium, the Kabinet of Wonders, the Meeting Place. But all OpenGreens are zones where culture and nature overlap, and where locals play with a diversity of solutions to make the city greener and their life more sustainable.
OPEN stands for openness, collectivity, experiment, bottom up, DIY, networks of creative people.
GREEN stands for n...
Hong Kong is home to more than 7 million people. Amongst the high rise apartments, product designer Michael Leung founder of HK Honey, has created his own space bringing nature back into the metropolis one box at a time.
HK Honey is an organisation of Hong Kong beekeepers, artists & designers who aim to communicate the value of bees to the human food chain & the benefits of locally produced honey. With a network of bee farms and a design studio, Michael and HK Honey harvest local honey & design products...
A pertinent question in the OpenGreens research is: Can artists make translations between biology, entomology and technology?
Don’t expect a balanced answer to this issue. This topic is a source for a long debate, one that has to be conducted collaboratively among the larger group of Time Inventors. Our shared work can become a common investigation into time relations within biological and circumstantial ecologies, through the lens of aesthetics. A...
Growth in art, society and culture.
An international conference, organized within the framework of the project TIK (Time Inventors’ Kabinet) and as an accompanying program of Science and Technology Week 2011.
Thursday November 10.
Utopia of the garden. Urban and rural gardens and today’s green utopias.
Could one say that art degenerates as it approaches gardening? (Robert Smithson – A...
The discovery of today: the 90-year old Anne Tyng, architect, collaborator of Buckminster Fuller and Louis Kahn. Anne Tyng's work is to inhabit geometry. Since the 1950s, when she worked closely with Louis I. Kahn and independently pioneered habitable space-frame architecture, Tyng has applied natural and numeric systems to built forms on all scales, from urban plans to domestic spaces. A tetrahedron, cube, octahedron, icosahedron, and dodecahedron, each is built to human scale and can be entered, explored, comprehended. For optimum effect, look through these open structures at the massive spiral that lifts from the wall and rotates towards the ceiling. This is how Tyng sees the world and derives...
Soft Borders was the main theme of the 4th Upgrade! International Conference & Festival on New Media Art, that took place in São Paulo, Brazil, October 18-21, 2010. Soft Borders embraced a wide variety of topics, cross-disciplinary approaches and presentations of cutting edge technologies. This exhibition has developed as the outcome of the 4th Upgrade! International gathering.
Artists: Not an Alternative, Mushon Zer-Aviv and Laila El-Haddad, Burak Arikan, Michelle Teran, Annemie Maes, Sara Schnadt, and Yael Kanarek.
place: Galeria de Arte da UNESP – Campus São Paulo - Rua Dr Bento Teobaldo Ferraz, 271 - Brazil
time: 3-6 november 2011
curated by: Silvia Laurentiz, Basak Senova, Elena Veljanovska
in...
Saturday october 29th we were recording the artist-wind-instruments-band in the surrounding fields of Kravin, Hranice. The band is one of the four marching bands that perform a composition determined by the wind. The project VITR (by Givan Bela) will be introduced during the eco-conference #05 in Praha, and will be presented as an installation during the final TIK festival in Brussels, may 2012.
Time Inventors’ Kabinet is a project, with an interest into ecology and media art, and a collaborative experiment with time, taking an ecological approach to observing patterns in time and time control systems. It gathers some experimental artists, gardeners, engineers, bricoleurs, cultural managers, organizers, documentarists, writers, musicians, as new 21st century style inventors with a non-conventional attitude.
Time Inventors’ Kabinet is een exerimenteel project dat ecologie en mediakunst samenbrengt. Het onderzoekt het concept tijd via de observatie van ecologische tijdsprocessen. In het project komen kunstenaarrs, tuiniers, ingenieurs, bricoleurs, managers, organisators, filmmakers, sch...
Quand l’art et la technologie se rencontrent pour permettre à la nature de s’adapter à une jungle de béton.
Si nous voulons vraiment remodeler nos vies urbaines afin qu’elles deviennent écologiquement durable il va falloir agir de manière tangible.
Mais où et comment pouvons nous créer des oasis de verdure dans la jungle de béton de nos cités ? Sur nos bancs de fenêtre, nos balcons, nos toits ?
L’artiste multimédia et activiste Annemie Maes nous donnera des réponses et des pistes pratiques.
Elle est depuis longtemps engagée dans l’éco-technologie et l’activisme de base.
En 2004, avec Guy Van Belle, elle crée OKNO, un collectif d’artistes dont l’objectif est de développer des projets ...
[flashvideo filename=http://opengreens.net/wp-content/plugins/flash-video-player/bee-monitoring.xml width=448 height=570 displayheight=336 overstretch=false thumbsinplaylist=true /]
Observations from the enhanced beehive in the okno garden.
On may 4th, 2011, we moved a swarm into this hive, and from than on we are filming with 2 webcams the behaviour of the city honeybees. This research (15 frames a second, from 4/5/2011 till now) gives us a lot of terrabytes of bee-monitoring. We'll work out some bio-artistic projects with it over time.
40 tuinen te bezoeken op zondag 25 september 2011
Na het grote succes van de edities in 2008,2009 en 2010 en dankzij de steun van het Brussels Hoofdstedelijk Gewest (Leefmilieu Brussel), beleeft het initiatief Tuinen in Feesttooi dit jaar haar vierde uitgave. Het grote publiek zal nog eens de gelegenheid krijgen om 40 privé- en semi-private tuinen te bezoeken, de ene nog origineler dan de andere, vol verrassingen!
Er zullen enkele tuinen bezocht kunnen worden die van Natagora het label "Natuur in de tuin" gekregen hebben.
De eigenaars van deze tuinen, de ontwerpers of voor het evenement opgeleide gidsen zullen het publiek uitnodigen om de charmes van deze “geheime tuinen” te o...
A local market at the start of the Brussels slowfood week, 18-25 september. We were present at the Vlaamse Steenweg - rue de Flandre, with our OpenGreens city honey. The people loved to 'taste their neighborhood'! The concept of the Connected OpenGreens was explained and we got many enthousiast reactions as well as late subscription for the Open Garden visit next weekend.
Flying home, the afternoon of a beautiful autumn day. The bees now collect and store pollen for their offspring-to-come next spring. Probably they get them at the big ivy tree on the wall...
august 23 - 25
Double barrel heating
How to make a double-barrel stove, suitable for heating bigger spaces in an ecological way? The results will be presented during the weekend beekeeping event, especially when it is cold in the evening.
august 26 - 28
Beehives
Creating beehives, inspired by traditional construction designs and sustainable and bee-friendly principles. With the participation of local as well as international beekeepers, artisans and artists. We will construct the Leaf Hive, invented in 1789 by François Huber, a TopBar Hive and a Warré Hive.
Over summer we are continuing our physical and digital research in our OpenGreens-lab. Describing plants, working with the bees (contributing to a University Ghent research program on the distribution of bee-virusses), collecting seeds and harvesting fruits and vegetables.
The gardens grow on the rythm of the light and we try to describe the ever changing colours in the urban OpenGreens ... working towards a publication for the end of september, the first...
Working together with my bees to create natural sculptures. In the fablab in Ghent I collected some nice found material which I adapted to the needs of the bees and the hives. It's a first try - i've put 2 adjusted frames in one of my 'split-off' colonies from this year. I hope they're yet strong enough to build into the strange materials. First check after 2 weeks, when back from Greece.
Yes! this week diving into the mathematical formulas. Planning to decypher Voronoi and Fibonacci sequences during the Processing workshop at Okno. Another moment to study the links between nature and mathematics. Leonardo Pisano Bigollo (c. 1170 – c. 1250) also known as Leonardo of Pisa, Leonardo Pisano, Leonardo Bonacci, Leonardo Fibonacci, or, most commonly, simply Fibonacci, was a Mathematician, considered by some “...
Annemie Maes participates in the workshops, presentations and experiments of the festival Desert Numerique. She will present okno's OpenGreens project. Desert Numerique is an artistic event gathering media artists, curators, producers, scientists, activists and publics around practices linking art, science and technologies; an invitation to bring digital arts in a unusual place, the village of Saint-Nazaire-le-Deesert (Drome, in France)....
A soundwalk in Thurn & Taxis + workshop: create your own OpenGreen and connect to the database.
In the morning Jonathan Prior guides us through the sounds of the city during a silent soundwalk on the wasteland of Thurn & Taxis. How does Brussels sound? Can sound create a space? These questions are asked and explained, while we listen to the ecological aspects of public spaces. During this guided tour Jonathan Prior lets us experience the public space in another way. Take your waterproof shoes and your camera to register the sounds as images.
In the afternoon Danielle Roberts and Annemie Maes introduce you to the OpenGreens database. With the image material of the silent soundwalk we ‘recreate’ the...
Jonathan Prior (University of Edinburgh, Institute of Geography) gives us insight in the ecological restauration of landscapes. The previous decades there has been a slow adoption of ecological restoration principles within the built (urban) environment. During his lecture ‘Ecological restoration, urban nature, and the reclamation of public spaces’ Prior wants to guide us in the methods and underlaying values (esthetic, social and political) of the recovery of damaged ecosystems and habitats.
Ecological restoration is the practice of assisting the recovery of damaged ecosystems, habitats or landscapes, to a point in time before the degradation occurred. Ecological restoration can therefore be ...
An experimental and playful hands-on workshop by Ralf Schreiber and Christian Faubel.
...it is a lot of fun to build your own robotic creature. As soon as the circuit starts working the robots begin to sing and jerk - there is always a great Hello.
It’s a magic moment and the constructor’s pride is often mixed with a little fear, that continuing soldering could possibly damage the just created little robot.
Time and again it is amazing to see, that such a wimpy, handcrafted creature can arouse empathy, can even activate a certain care in the builder…. (rs)
The most simple way to create and build "life like" machines or robots is by the use of analogue oscillator circu...
Naar aanleiding van de veldproef met synthetische gewassen (genetisch gemanipuleerde aardappelen) is het debat rond gentechnologie en een duurzaam landbouwmodel de laatste maanden volop gestart.
De Field Liberation Movement hoopt dat dit slechts het begin is van een breed en inhoudelijk maatschappelijk debat dat boeren, consumenten, het milieu en de voedselkwaliteit ten goede zal komen. Laat ons dit wetenschappelijk en maatschappelijk debat voeren alvorens GGOs te testen in de vrije natuur !
Onafhankelijk wetenschappelijk onderzoek speelt een cruciale rol in de ondersteuning van een duurzaam landbouwmodel, maar dan moeten onze onderzoekers wel de middelen krijgen om de juiste vragen te stellen...
Sunday may 22nd at 1pm/3pm, Annemie Maes will give a presentation of Okno's OpenGreens project at Upgrade! Zagreb, AKC Medika, Hacklab 01 - Pierottijeva 11, Zagreb.
If we really want to reshape our urban way of life on a sustainable and ecological basis, we will have to take tangible measures. But how and where can we create green oases in the concrete jungles of our towns? On the window ledge, the balcony or the rooftop?
The multimedia artist and activist Annemie Maes will give us some answers and practical tips. She has long been involved in eco-technologies and grass-roots activism. In 2004, she and Guy van Belle set up OKNO, an artists collective that aims to develop innovative cultural...
27 May 2011 — 19:00
Rue de Flandre / Vlaamsesteenweg
1000 Brussels ……
Friday 27 May 2011, 7pm, Rue de Flandre, Brussels. Car traffic has reached its critical mass. As the last automobile joins in, the roads suddenly come to a standstill. Filling up the motorways, the congestion rapidly flows over into the smallest alley: the traffic jam has ceased to be a regrettable coincidence. It ha...
An experimental and playful hands-on workshop (BEAM related) by Ralf Schreiber.
[*small unspectacular autonomous electronic machines - that attract attention by minimal tiny movements, light or soft sonic output.]
...it is a lot of fun to build your own robotic creature. As soon as the circuit starts working the robots begin to sing and jerk - there is always a great Hello.
It’s a magic moment and the constructor’s pride is often mixed with a little fear, that continuing soldering could possibly damage the just created little robot.
Time and again it is amazing to see, that such a wimpy, handcrafted creature can arouse empathy, can even activate a certain care in the builder…. (rs)<...
The plastic bag is filled with willow woodchips mixed with pleurotus ostreatus spawn. It took 4 weeks for the mycellium to overgrow the woodchips. The 5th week, the mushrooms started to come out the fissures in the plastic bag.
During 5 days and 5 nights I took a picture of the growing mushrooms, every 30 minutes. Unfortunately, the flashes didn't went off several times, which gives some jumps in the steady growth pace.
But the whole is a nice example of a natural time bending process, 5 days and nights compressed in 30 seconds.
[flashvideo filename=https://so-on.annemariemaes.net/SO-ON/OpenGreen/pleurotus/mushroom.flv height=315 width=448 image=https://so-on.annemariemaes.net/SO-ON/OpenGreen/pleurotus/pleurotus.jpg...
Adhérant au concept communautaire mis en place par le projet international « Window Farms », un véritable jardin, recyclé, suspendu et vivant...
Nous créerons ensemble des jardins suspendus. Ce projet DIY, faisant partie du projet en réseau Window Farms, consiste en un jardin hydroponique, très esthétique, et élaboré à partir de matériaux récupérés. L'artiste Kyd Campbell (CA/DE), rejointe par les artistes/écologistes Annemie Maes (BE) et ingenieur Jérôme Lauer (FR/DE), vont collaborer pour construire un jardin suspendu au village de Saint-Nazaire-le-Désert, et offrir plusieurs présentations d'approches créatives et écologiques et vous assisteront pour créer votre propre jardin suspendu.
Nowadays, we are treated to a wealth of information about the current global crises — poverty, environmental destruction and all those finance markets supposedly teetering on the edge of the abyss. Yet the time for far-reaching political change is long overdue. After all, despite the dramatic consequences of a consumerist lifestyle, the goal of non-stop growth continues to be propagated. Natural resources are being wasted as though there were no tomorrow, while the international finance markets seem to operate free of any legal or ethical restraints. Is the public sector today ruled by economic interests and nothing else?
Through this seed swap we want to draw public attention to a practice that has become increasingly widespread throughout Europe over the past few years and that could be made illegal by the planned EU laws: http://www.seed-sovereignty.org/EN/
Tens of thousands of people throughout Europe are actively demanding that the right to produce seeds remains in the hands of small farmers and gardeners. A diversity of crops has nourished mankind for thousands of years. Seeds that we have inherited from past generations are the basis of life and are essential for food sovereignty.
The big seed trusts are determined to obtain worldwide control. This has...
Through this seed swap we want to draw public attention to a practice that has become increasingly widespread throughout Europe over the past few years and that could be made illegal by the planned EU laws: http://www.seed-sovereignty.org/EN/
If we really want to reshape our urban way of life on a sustainable and ecological basis, we will have to take tangible measures. But how and where can we create green oases in the concrete jungles of our towns? On the window ledge, the balcony or the rooftop?
The multimedia artist and activist Annemie Maes will use her workshop to give us some answers and practical tips. She has long been involved in eco-technologies and grass-roots activism and, in 2004, she and Guy van Belle set up OKNO, an artists collective that aims to develop innovative cultural projects linking art and technology. For example: Connected Open Greens – the outskirts of town where culture and nature can come together s...
Das Symposion EcoConference2 am 9. und 10. April wird auf folgende Themen fokusieren: Wahrnehmung von Zeit, Erinnerungskonzepte und -modelle, Bedeutung und Definition von Zeit.
The symposion /EcoConference 2 on 9th and 10th of april will focus on the following topics: perception of time, concepts and modells of memory, meaning and definition of time.
Konferenzsprache/conference language: english.
all info on: http://esc.mur.at/index.html
exhibition and conference at ESC/Graz, in the context of the Time Inventors' Kabinet project and the Actuelle Kunst im Graz-festival.
OpenGreens – Aktionen und Rezepte für eine nachhaltige Stadt
At ESC, Annemie Maes mounts a wall installation representing a virtual netwerk of OpenGreens. OpenGreens are grey city-zones, where culture and nature overlap and finally enter into a symbiotic relationship. How sustainable is the city? Can we provide for our own food, our own energy, our own media ecology?
Can we grow a selection of fruits and vegetables in rooftop gardens or collect wild edible plants in wastelands and on building sites - enough to live on?
Are you interested to start your own OpenGreen, on your balcony, your rooftop or your window sill?
Come and talk to us, we can advise you on how to set up green patches in unusual places … and get the best out of it.
http://esc.mur.at/opengreens-esc.html
Voronoi-Diagramme sind ein Symbol für die OpenGreens und zeigen Stadtstrukturen auf. In der Installation OpenGreens Graz I werden die für die Stadt interessanten Gebiete - Brachland, Baustellen, Gärten, Parks und andere Freiflächen erforscht und in den Stadtplan eingetragen, gekennzeichnet mit Post-its, Farben und anderen Markern.
Der Stadtplan wächst mit der Zeit, unter Beteiligung des Graz-Tik-Teams und interessierten BesucherInnen der Ausstellung. Die Information wird gleichzeitig in die OpenGreens Datenbank und den opengreens.net Blog eingetragen.
Swohl die Datenbank als auch der Blog sind Teil der Ausstellung, die gleichzeitig auch als Arbeitsort dient, an dem Menschen weitere Informationen eintragen können.
Following the bee monitoring workshop, we have an Okno OpenGreens working day:we start to clean out the garden, compost last years' herbs and make a design for the coming season, bring in the monitored hives and introduce new garden projects, e.g. 'butterfly project'.
All sensors for the observationhive arrived and we got 4 webcams, so we'll have a lot of toys to play with in our 2nd bee-monitoring workshop.We can start enhancing our glass observation hive! Bart Aertsen, professional designer carpenter, will make a shed to protect our new observation hive from hard sun and snow. He'll also bring some working material and a dremel. I have an additional dremel to use.Please bring your additional electronics, your soldering iron (we have some at okno - 1 good one) and more stuff you think to be handy ...
March 2011: after a citywalk through Graz we mapped the upcoming ESC projects in the city's public space. The long term projects will be documented in the OpenGreens database. Projects concern: creek walks, wasteland monitoring, creating OpenGreens city gardens, a public school project, sonification of the city.
The results of the mapping and ongoing comments on the first lay-out will be presented during the exhibition Take Your Time - Graz april 2011.
This Brussels map visualises the flightroutes of the city honeybees to their foraging areas. With an analysis report of the pollen in their honey, we were able to track back the trees and herbs on which they are foraging in a radius of 3 km around their hive. Clicking the link below let you listen to their songs: the sounds of the hive.
sounds of the beehive.mp3
We are in Graz to present the OpenGreens database for the first time. We will do a mapping session with the stakeholders of the OpenGreensGraz, and contextualize the OpenGreens in different levels on the city map. As a preparation, we go for a city walk, and our local guides give us background information during this nice stroll through the inner city, its hidden gardens, backyards and wastelands.
More information will follow later this week after the mapping session and the introduction to the OpenGreens database.
Next week we have the first public presentation of our OpenGreens database. This will happen at ESC in Graz, Austria - our partner in the TIK/ EU project.
The Connected OpenGreens project is a collective OKNO project.
COG is a project around marginal zones [in the city] where culture and nature overlap and enter into a symbiotic relationship.
The project researches different bottom up approaches for designing green human environments that have the stability and diversity of natural ecosystems.
In the COG database we keep scrutinuously track of the monitoring of these ecosystems. We insert technology in the gardens and take a closer look on how the fusion of natural and artificial matter produces...
Monday february 8th, 14°C and all bees are flying out. They start their spring cleansing flights, and they pull all dead bees out of the hive. The temperature inside the hive is rising up towards 33°C - this means that the queen started ponding eggs again, and that there is young brood to be taken care off by the worker bees.
I wonder how it is perceived by the bee colony, to fly out and to find nothing: no pollen yet, no nectar neither. The bee-flights are executed close to the hive. The bees stay low to the ground, as if they are looking for something ...
Please subscribe to our newsletter. It keeps you updated about our OpenGreens activities.
It is a low traffic, regular e-mail list. Of course your address stays private and you can unsubscribe at any time.
http://okno.be/mailman/listinfo/connectedopengreens
You can also send a mail to opengreens/////okno/be for specific questions, e.g. how to become a contributor to this OpenGreens blog.
It will be my pleasure to send you your personal login.
If you're interested to monitor your own OpenGreen patch, citygarden, urban wasteland or the plants on your windowsill, and compare it to other gardens in the opengreens database, you...
Seed Sovereignity: International Days of Action, Brussels, 17-18 April 2011.
Tens of thousands of people throughout Europe are actively demanding that the right to produce seeds remains in the hands of small farmers and gardeners. A diversity of crops has nourished mankind for thousands of years. Seeds that we have inherited from past generations are the basis of life and are essential for food sovereignty.
more on: http://www.seed-sovereignty.org/EN/index.html
Version 2 of the windclock describes the OpenGreen rooftop garden in the center of Brussels. The wind-values, registrated by the photosensor, are linked to the description of the plants in the rooftop garden. The stronger the wind...
Scary but true: in Harvard University they are working on a colony of robotic bees, the robobees.
http://robobees.seas.harvard.edu/
Pollution, pesticides, genetically modified crops and monocultures are, in combination with parasites and pathogens, contributing factors to the disappearance of the honeybees. According to Albert Einstein, if all the bees disappeared of the surface of the globe then man would...
Seed Sovereignity: International Days of Action, Brussels, 17-18 April 2011.
Tens of thousands of people throughout Europe are actively demanding that the right to produce seeds remains in the hands of small farmers and gardeners. A diversity of crops has nourished mankind for thousands of years. Seeds that we have inherited from past generations are the basis of life and are essential for food sovereignty.
more on: http://www.seed-sovereignty.org/EN/index.html
The Stropharia Rugoso Annulata is a first experiment in a series to grow edible mushrooms in the so-on edible rooftop garden. We choose this specimen of mushrooms to start with, as it is relatively easy to grow on mulch, so one does not need the more complex and delicate method of working with spawn on logs.
Over the weekend, I spend a saturday afternoon by cutting willow-wood into woodchips. According Mycobois, the supplier of the mushroom-brood, this is an appropriate kind of wood to grow the King Stropharia. Early february, I spread the spawn over 2 square meters, on a wind-protected and relatively shady spot in the rooftop garden. Over the spawn I spread the willow woodchips in a layer of 10 cm. In the top layer of the woodchips I divided the rest of the spawn insmall holes, 20cm apart from each other. Along the information, the mycelium should start growing through the woodchips, and in a few months the whole surface of the chips should be covered by mycelium roots.
Around the months of may/june, I can expect the fruits, the Stropharia mushrooms. This should go on over a few months, till it becomes too cold in october.
Stropharia rugoso annulata, commonly known as the wine cap stropharia, "garden giant", burgundy mushroom or king stropharia, is an agaric of the family Strophariaceae found in Europe.
Unlike many other members of the genus Stropharia, it is widely regarded as a choice edible and cultivated for food.
The king stropharia can grow to 20 cm high with a reddish-brown convex to flattening cap up to 30 cm across, the size leading to another colloquial name godzilla mushroom. The gills are initially pale, then grey, and finally dark purple-brown in colour. The firm flesh is white, as is the tall stem which bears a wrinkled ring. This is the origin of the specific name which means "wrinkled-ringed".
It is found on wood chips and bark mulch across Europe in summer and autumn. Described as very tasty by some authors, king stropharia is easily cultivated on a medium similar to what it grows on naturally.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stropharia_rugosoannulata
A workshop in which we try to understand the distributed intelligence of social insects (here a bee colony) : their behaviour, ecology and sociobiology. By monitoring the bees and beehives with all kinds of sensors, we study the colony as a community. We will document this research with all kind of media (photo, film, audio, text, code) and we will use the extracted data to make artworks based upon the bees behaviour over time. We try to connect nature and technology in a new relationship of interconnections.
Since last year, the OKNO's are setting up bee-monitoring systems. Last year, the bees were faster than us, and the technology was half ready when the bees started to swarm and went into their new home (not yet equipped with sensors and other stuff ...).
This year, whe hope to be on schedule. We've set up 2 bee-monitoring workshops, in which we gather and exchange the experience of beekeepers, bee-technologists, bee-monitors, or just people interested in bees and their behaviour. We will be 8 people to work during 2 days in a very concentrated way on new bee-houses (see below) and enhanced beehives. Some of you have already experimented with specific parts of the technology (sensors). let's see how we can make the best out of it by putting construction, hardware, software and bee-behaviour knowledge together.
The purpose is to develop a device that can serve for bee-monitoring in an extended network (local & international). We want to offer the observation-data online in realtime via a dedicated server, and we want to be able to compare the data forthcoming from different beehives. Will we end up with a stand-alone bee-monitoring device to add to the hive, or will it be a manual on how to augment your own beehive to fit into the network. Time will tell!
Some nice manuals to start from for building hives:
micro dwellings for bees:
http://www.n55.dk/manuals/micro_dwellings/micro_dwellings.html
How sustainable is the city?
Can we provide for our own food, our own energy, our own media ecology?
Can we grow a selection of fruits and vegetables in rooftop gardens or collect wild edible plants in wastelands and on building sites - enough to live on?
Are you interested to start your own OpenGreen, on your balcony, your rooftop or your window sill?
Come and talk to us, we can advise you on how to set up green patches in unusual places ... and get the best out of it.
You can find all information on OpenGreens in the first edition of our OpenGreens catalog, download the catalog here: https://so-on.annemariemaes.net/SO-ON/OpenGreen/COG-catalog/v.1.0-smallspread.pdf
And...
Everyday we set a different topic for discussion in our connected OpenGreens exchange corner, at Changing Tents during Burning Ice#4.
monday 17.01.11 - building the hexayurts
tuesday 18.01.11 - the economic value of the honeybee
wednesday 19.01.11 - compost - recycle day, spring cleaning
thursday 20.01.11 - the connected OpenGreens database
friday 21.01.11 - gift economy, the Kanal euro - complementary currency
saturday 22.01.11 - bee monitoring, enhanced beehives
sunday 23.01.11 - collaps
You can download the connected OpenGreens catalog (v.1.0):
https://so-on.annemariemaes.net/SO-ON/OpenGreen/COG-catalog/v.1.0-smallspread.pdf
The...
The Okno participation in Burning Ice #4 consists of an OpenGreens Exchange Corner. The trading basis is the Connected OpenGreen Catalog … this is a book to be written in a collaborative way. It lists all goods and services that can be exchanged between OpenGreen users.
The maquette of the book is the basis for the discussions in the OpenGreens exchange corner, and the shared information and services cover different urban topics.
You can consider the book as a manual/proposition for living in the cities in a different way …
If we want to alter our habits, we’ll have to change our ideas on what is most essential and necessary in our lives. We’ll have to break with the common rules, deviate from th...
This fourth edition of Burning Ice will be built up around the theme of economy. Climate change confronts us with the consequences of our actions. It turns our world-view with its endless growth completely upside down. Our civilisation appears to be underpinned by waste, excess and fundamental inequality. The capitalist theory of progress believes in economic growth as the best measure of human well-being, in a market price in which all costs are contained and in money as the perfect indicator of value. We can understand the current crises as an inevitable result of the blind faith in this holy trinity: growth, price, money.
In Burning Ice #4 we will hear economists, philosophers and artists...
Workshop on electromagnetic arts. Interference-free Foraging Mobility in Brussels.
Results of December 12th walk (5 walkers, 5 devices) in the garden of okno (Again wide band high frequency intensity). http://www.psychogeophysics.org
Electromagnetic fields can have adverse effects on living organisms - honeybees are especially sensitive.
Although urban environments provide...
On Friday 10 december Constant continues to interrogate the active potential of online media archives. After a short introduction to the work done at Active Archives* so far, Michael Murtaugh tours us through the Active Archives Video Wiki software he is developing.
We will than speak with Pieter Geenen about his work-in-progress using the Active Archives system to experiment with displacement, both in text and image. We also invited Annemie Maes to present pad.ma, "an online archive of densely text-annotated video material, primarily footage and not-finished films", and she will explain how it is being employed in the OKNO project The Time Inventor's Kabinet.
Last but not least, Peter Westenberg...
sostenuto conference in Ljubljana, Slovenia - 1/5 december 2010
presentation of the OpenGreens project in the section: New Collectives - 2 december 18:40
Ljubljana community garden project by obrat.org
Numerous artistic and cultural actors in the Mediterranean area, in Europe, and throughout the world have noticed the important changes in our societies and the difficulties resulting from these changes. As experimenters and explorers, they are putting their efforts into proposing new ways of operating in the cultural sector and beyond.
In this moment of multiple and confusing crises, the European Union is also searching for new perspectives through its EU 2020 strategy. Within this context, it seems important to highlight how cultural actors are coping with social transformations, with transformations of public policies, or with transformations of cultural and artistic practices (new collaborative practices, the integration of communication technologies, etc.).
During the Ready to Change Forum, we are hazarding the following questions: is it possible to combine our knowledge, our experiences, and our desires in order to take a collective position? Is it possible to demonstrate the determinant role that we are assuming in this moment of our history, one which is illuminating the meanings and reconstructing models of solidarity, and proposing new ways of thinking and new forms of organization and relationships?
creative writing on collective basis, korcula seen in slow motion:
Location: croatia, korcula, grey area
Keywords: windclock, workshop, time inventors' kabinet, TIK, screwing
Closeup of a hand making a bolt spin along a rod of metal. Glimpses of the transparent construction it is a part of. Hand screwing a nut on a tige, inside studio/workshop.
A black screen is followed by some compression errors in the video. Then we see a hand screwing down a nut on a rod, first with the index and middel fingers, then with support of the thumb. In the background we see a piece of clothing on a chair. Light falls in from the left. The nut descends into a clear plastic object, a WindClock in construction. The hand secures the nut. We hear people in a room, objects being moved.
We hear a dialogue:
Guy:“Great idea ????”
Barb:“Who had this great idea?”
Guy:“Alexandra”
Barb laughs.
pause
Guy: “I know it sounds radical, to ?? data from the server”.
Barb laughs.
Ralf talks, unintelligible, a metal object falls.
Nut is screwing down.
Workshop in PaF, St.Erme, France - Being Willy Dep. November 10-14, 2010.
Observations with a pinhole camera, a close reading of nature in the early career of Willy Dep.
Open Greens : marginal zones where culture and nature overlap and enter into a symbiotic relationship. The Kabinet : a collection of city gardens, abandoned agricultural and industrial spaces or miniature parcs on your balconies and window sills. Discover how you can expand your creative space by participating in an ecological network, studying the interactions between organisms and their environment.
[flashvideo filename=http://opengreens.net/wp-content/plugins/flash-video-player/OpenGreens_research.xml width=448 height=635 displayheight=248 overstretch=false thumbsinplaylist=true /]
Research on the ecology of urban habitats, guided by the observation of city honeybees.
The range of habitats in urban areas is surprising. Most of the major terrestrial habitat types are represented in towns and cities, either as remnants of previously rural environments, or as artificial analogues of semi-natural habitats.
The Open Green project focuses on two rooftopgardens located in Brussels’ city center on 400 m from one another : an edible forest rooftop garden on top of a parking lot and a wild flower rooftop garden on top of an old warehouse.
The Open Green project blends organic and technological matter into one and the same nature. Through analogue and digital means we do long term observations on the growth, blossoming and decay of plants and insects submitted to natural elements such as wind, sun, rain and pollution in an urban context.
We monitor and extract data from natural processes both on micro garden level as on macro city level and make these data in realtime available online via open wireless citynetworks.
a workshop about a hypothetical content, method and style for new ecological media writing today. 17-19 November 2010 @ OKNO - Brussels
In a concise 3-day program, we try to lay the foundations for a common style in treating the TIK themes and materials. Conform to the purpose of the 2-year project, and its bottom-up but collaborative strategies, we deal with the several blind spots that are still open, for thinking about a changed creative output in any media form: text, code, image, sound, word,…
The real subject of workshops is closely related to the TIK project scheme and deals with:
- the available documentation of the previous events and activities
- the representation a...
Plexiglass windclock, based on a Da Vinci anemometer model. The clock has a gradient range from black to white and a photosensor reads out the temporary values generated by the wind.
Location 1: grey)(area gallery in Korcula, Croatia - presentation of the windclocks-workshop of TIK/ time inventors' kabinet.
Location 2: so-on's OpenGreen rooftop, Brussels - measuring windtime and describing the OpenGreen.
[flashvideo filename=http://opengreens.net/wp-content/plugins/flash-video-player/textual-gardens.xml...
Wax Or the Discovery of Television Among the Bees is the first independent feature film to have been edited on a digital non-linear system. It is also the first film (independent or otherwise) to have been re-formatted as hypertext and posted on the Internet.
In the story at the centre of Waxweb Jacob Maker is a beekeeper who designs flight simulators. "One day, the past arrives out of the future, and Jacob enters".
German airports use "Biodetective" honeybees to monitor air quality. Environmental monitoring has come a long way since the proverbial canary in the coal mine. Now we use bees. Airports in Germany are using honeybees as "biodetectives," regularly testing their honey for a suite of pollutants, the New York Timesreports. This year's first tests were conducted in early June at Düsseldorf International Airport, and the bees got a clean bill of health. That means the air was clean, too. Members of a local beekeepers' group keep the bees, and the honey, "Düsseldorf Natural," is bottled and given away as gifts, the Times says. About 200,000 bees are involved in the Düsseldorf program; seven other Ge...
[flashvideo filename=https://so-on.annemariemaes.net/SO-ON/OpenGreen/bee-varroa.flv height=262 width=448 image=https://so-on.annemariemaes.net/SO-ON/OpenGreen/bee-varroa.jpg /]
During a check of the hives, I found this young workerbee just next to the flighthole. The t° being below 10°, I guess she was hit by the cold. She seemed more dead than alive, and I decided to take her inside for an inspection under the microscope. While filming, a varroamite fell out of her thorax-fur. The young bee got more lively again, due to the warmth of the microscope lights. I put her in front of the flighthole, and she nicely walked into the hive again. I destroyed the dirty varroa mite.
Varroa is still a h...
Where is the litterature which gives expression to Nature? He would be a poet who could impress the winds and streams into his service, to speak for him; who nailed words to their primitive senses, as farmers drive down stakes in the spring, which the frost has heaved; who derived his words as often as he used them – transplanted them to his page with earth adhering to their roots; whose words were so true and fresh and natural that they would appear to expand like the buds at the approach of spring, though they lay half smothered between two musty leaves in a library – aye, to bloom and bear fruit there, after their kind, annually, for the faithful reader, in sympathy with surrounding Nat...
Just a perfect day. Indian summer. The bees bring in pollen in abundancy. I just discovered the immense ivy covering the whole wall of la Bellone. Winterfood for my bees.
Today I started to note down the inside hive t° every hour, and compared it to the outside t° and the outside humidity.
In the sun, reading Indeterminacy. Cage was a well-known mycologist. Crazy about fungi. Short stories and mesostics about mushrooms. A...
Tagine recipies with vegetables from the season - some of them straight from our city rooftop garden:
take 2 tagine cookers, a 31cm one and a 25cm one. Soak them for some moments in water.
Ingredients...
Brussels, jardin experimental, October 2010
Looking for Mushrooms.
Friday, october 8th, I went to look for mushrooms at the Jardin Experimental Massart, one of the...
Bees are an essential link in our food- and flora ecosystem. They pollinate a third of what we eat.The loss of biodiversity threatens the survival of the bees.Due to monocultures and pesticides the bees get weaker and they become more sensitive to bee diseases as varroase and colony collapse disorder.
The biodiversity of the city -the balconies, parks, streets, wastelands and city gardens- shapes a perfect foraging area for the creation...
Exchange between the Czech Republic bee association members and the Brussels Urban Beekeepers.
City apiaries, research projects on city honey plants, bees as actors to discover the city's public space ... all this compared to countryside beekeeping in a country where beekeeping represents a serious part of the agricultural ressources.
Triangular Walk is een experimentele stadstocht rond de kanaalzone, waarbij kunst, wetenschap en activisme mekaar kruisen. Drie gidsen leiden drie groepen deelnemers middels een speels concept door drie stedelijke tuinprojecten en de omliggende straten. Na de 4 uur durende 'driehoeks'wandeling ontmoeten de verschillende groepen mekaar voor het eerst voor de afsluitende presentatie in de Open Green Rooftop Garden.
Deze informatieve,...
On saturday september 18th, three Brussels art labs invite you in Koolmijnenkaai 30-34. OKNO opens their rooftop garden and Open Greens-project to all. You can taste urban honey and drinks made of plants from the garden. You can nibble on FoAM's detoxifying treats to help you fight urban afflictions, spiced up with plants from the Kanal area. Q-O2 invites the sound artist Pierre Berthet for a concert using waterdrops as an instrument.
After a day of walking between various urban gardens alongside the canal, FoAM will serve a range of detoxifying bites, especially crafted to eliminate toxins and pollutants from the human bodily ecology. The aperitif combines ingredients, methods and performance-eating...
TIK is een samenwerkingsproject rond ecologie en media kunst, en belicht het subversieve karakter daarvan. Gedurende 2 jaar wordt gewerkt aan het realizeren van een serie windklokken en een tijds-server, met de bedoeling een andere sensitiviteit ten aanzien van tijd te belichten. Het project bevat een belangrijk luik artistiek onderzoek naar de ecologische achtergronden en mogelijkheden, via workshops rond de constructie van de windmolens en -klokken, internet tijds-protocols, relevante visualizering en sonificatie. Daaruit volgen collectieve creatieve werken zoals genetwerkte installaties en webkunst, live radio sessies, performances en tentoonstellingen. Een tweede luik, het zgn. "open green",...
The Summer Workshops Kravín take place in a rural environment, at the edge of the small village Hranice u Malce, in the Vysocina region of the Czech Republic.
The dates - August 24 - 29. (Closing party on Saturday 28th).
The activities will twist around the several main themes: beekeeping / wind clocks / radio art / + agri-kultura.
In the beekeeping workshop, Annemie Maes will talk about new artistic approaches towards beekeeping and her experiences with the citz beehives. The apiarists from Vysocina from the Czech Beekeepers Union (Cesky svaz vcelaru - see http://www.beekeeping.cz/) will talk about their experiences. We plan to visit the nearby beekeeping educational center in Nasavrky village, ...
… TIK is a project, an interest into ecology and media art, a collaborative experiment with time … taking an ecological approach to observing patterns in time and time control systems … the creative tools we build to generate new audio and visual artworks … a 'horloge a vent', an imaginary time keeping device regulated by the irregular movement of the wind … Build your own Wind Clock in our fresh air and connected Open Green testing grounds!
Okno participates in the e-culture fair : 'Future of the Labs'.
As part of the E-CULTURE FAIR 2010, BALTAN Laboratories is organising and hosting a presentation of Dutch, Belgian and German media art laboratories, brought together around three shared themes. This is an international presentation of BALTAN’s Future of the Lab research and one of the 12 projects from the Netherlands at the ECF.
The E-CULTURE FAIR 2010 will be showcasing innovative projects in the cross-over fields of creative industry, research, education and media art from August 23 – 25 on the second floor of the Dortmunder U – Centre for Art and Creativity. It is the first step of the envisaged long-term cooperation betwe...
Mal au Pixel festival is looking at connecting technology, urban electronics and social transformation issues, and to investigate our contemporary beliefs. The festival brings together young digital artists and unconventionnal electronics: unexpected technologies, prototypes and open ended events.
For its fifth edition, Mal au Pixel further explores environmental issues and looks at the signals coming from the South, through initiatives from the worldwide DIY community.
ALTLABS MEETING au 104 • June 27 • 14h-19h
104 rue d'Aubervilliers - 5 rue Curial, Paris 19
with : Okno | Trias Culture | Ker Thiossane | TMPLab | HONF | CRAS | APO33 | Refarm the City | DakarLug | ...
http://www.le104.fr
...
The 8th of march 2010 we started to setup a permaculture rooftopgarden on the 6th floor of a parking in the center of Brussels. It was a very cold day, -6° , cloudy and snowy. The next day we got some icy sun but all of us were freezing, working outside! At the end of the second day, the basic structure of the garden was in place. To follow the evolution of the edible forest rooftopgarden you can check the 'Open Green' category in http://padma.okno.be - in this video-repository you get a lot of descriptions and annotations on the how and why and the evolution of the garden.
Following video is a timelapse account of the 2 setup days, with a framerate of 1 image/second. The length of the video ...
Since 2006, City Mine(d) devote themselves to the issue of economic paradoxes in Brussels. Under the banner MICRONOMICS, they look for answers at the micro...
http://www.happynewfestival.be/Klinkende_Stad.html
MAHILA is a multi media project that engages with women empowerment in small communities, here especially focused on Indian countrywomen affected by climate change. The project is presented in a twofold installation. One room unveils a multiple speaker ante-chamber that guides to the second room where a film is shown. The first room gives a taste of the material and atmosphere that the artists captured during their research in India. By the use of polyphonic principles and theatrical setups Billy Bultheel creates a simple yet elegant sound installation approaching the contemplative Indian landscape.
The second room shows a film made by Annemie Maes, which is a reflective documentary on women empowerment, going from west to east and vice versa.
CALL FOR PARTICIPATION!
Prelude to another time
Online 25-26-27 April 2010.
Soon OKNO, ESC and COL-ME will start a 2-year long project called Time Inventors' Kabinet. The idea is to rethink the way we are perceiving time, relate it to ecological concepts, and see what the impact could be on creating media art works. For more information, please read below the "Introduction to the "Time Inventors' Kabinet" [TIK]".
The online sessions on 25-26-27 April are a starting point. These days, we will try to work out some ideas, using simple tools like a wiki and a chat server. We will try to generate some basic textual material together for developing collaborative works based on the idea of Wind Clocks, ecology and time.
For more information: http://timeinventorskabinet.org/wiki/doku.php
Each session introduces a couple of subjects we can discuss and write out together. Just to see what the creative interests could be and to link them to relevant existing resources and documentation. We hope to come to already some preliminary ideas, that can be further developed within the future TIK Project workshops.
Participation is possible either from OKNO's space in Brussels (see http://okno.be/node/194), from home, or anywhere else with internet access. We encourage not to work alone, but to invite other interested artists as to encourage collective creativity.
The year 2010 will be decisive in the debate about intellectual property rights concerning seeds. The EU wants to pass seed legislation that is uniform throughout Europe. In the future, will just industrial varieties be available on the seed market while regional and farmers varieties will be found only in museums and show gardens? All signs indicate that seed corporations are using the revision of the seed law to expand their power further....
HOW TO MAKE SEEDBALLS? Seedballs consist of mixing one measure of seeds for next season's crop with 3 measures of compost and 5 measures of red clay, and sometimes manure then formed into small balls. Much less seed is used than in conventional growing, resulting in fewer plants which are smaller but stronger with a higher yield. The technique is useful for seeding thin and compacted soils, and avoiding seed eaters. It is an ancient technique that was re-introduced by Masanobu Fukuoka, an advocate of natural farming.
Seedballs and seedbombing are perfect tools to put guerilla gardening into practice. Guerrilla gardening is political gardening, a form of direct action, primarily practiced by...
The Barefoot Beekeeper is a revolutionary book about 'sustainable', chemical-free beekeeping.
The author strips away all unnecessary complication and confusion, demonstrating that 'modern' beekeeping methods are largely to blame for the poor state of health of the honeybee and that the commercialization of beekeeping marked the start of the disease and parasite problems that honeybees have been trying to deal with ever since.
The author advocates small-scale, sustainable...
Net als in andere agglomeraties ontbreekt het ook in heel wat Brusselse wijken aan tuinen. Diverse vormen van (milieu)hinder, zoals verontreiniging, stof, lawaai en overstromingen worden steeds groter. Groendaken dragen bij tot meer natuur in de stad en tot de oplossing van heel wat milieuproblemen.
Bijdragen tot een toename van de oppervlakte groen en van de biodiversiteit en zorgen voor een betere waterretentie door zowel platte als hellende daken te beplanten met langzaam groeiende gewassen of, nog beter, met ware tuintjes.
Meer info : download de info-fiche eco-bouwen van leefmilieu brussel
With the urban garden project we want to blend the natural and the digital world in one and the same eco-system. We will explore how this fusion takes place: investigate in a digital way the growth, blossoming and decay of plants while they are submitted to the natural elements as wind, rain, snow, etc.
Can this evolution be generated, controlled, enhanced or imagined in artworks? Is our environment programmable? How does the fusion of natural and artificial matter produce new organisms, new environments, new natures? How does technology animate nature and space, and how do users and programs animate matter?
We observe the physical connections between people, nature and sensor-networks. We introduce...
Snowy days are over, the bees are flying out again and we started with the preparations for the built-up of the rooftopgarden. An edible garden. 300m2 on the 6th floor -on top of a parkinglot- in the center of the city. A natural environment built-up in an artificial way, a semi-controlled ecosystem, a shelter for birds and bees, an experimental zone for urban agriculture.
Trees, schrubs and vergetables will be put together in different layers so that they work harmoniously in relation to each other and to their environment. The rooftop offers a microclimate which is ideal for permaculture approaches. All trees, tall and small shrubs and other plants have edible berries. Land, animals and people,...
During 1 of tipping point's Open Space Sessions, Maarten Roels and myself propose the topic: urban agriculture and urban walking. In following document you can read an overview of the points we discussed in our group : points of interest, obstacles, food as basis for change, walking the city and solutions. Conclusion : What will YOU do (the coming 6 months) to tacle climate change?
Download group O's pdf and add your own solutions.some more suggestions: download hereDAAD : Do And...
From october 1st till october 7th, I followed a workshop/residence at the Navdanya Farm of Vandana Shiva, in Dehradun, North India.
Participants made up a diverse mix of scientists, strategic thinkers, artists, farmers and students. We discussed Genetically Modified Organisms (a case study: Percy Schmeiser’s war against Monsanto), Biological Commons, Fair Trade and the Organic Revolution.
Before and after the lectures and discussions, we practised yoga in the early morning, worked on the farmland in the afternoons and did some great collective cooking in the evening (all with organically grown products from the farm).
Conclusion: mix tradition with diversity. Take good things from other cultures, b...
Summary of an interview I conducted with Vandana Shiva during the workshop and seminar 'The Future of Food' on the Navdanya-farm in Dehradun, India - early october 2008.
[flashvideo filename=https://so-on.annemariemaes.net/SO-ON/ekoTime/vandana-subt.flv height=262 width=448 image=https://so-on.annemariemaes.net/SO-ON/ekoTime/vandana-film.jpg /]
You can view this info also on PADMA (public access digital media archive).
click here for the excerpt :Vandana Shiva on Diverse Women for Diversity
Press 'P' to start the video excerpt.
click here for the transcript of this section.
Beekeeping goes back throughout history and was an art that was closely related to goddess worship in the ancient world. Bees are a matriarchal society, closely related to the feminine.
MELISSA - "bee" was the title given to Aphrodite's high priestess at the honeycomb-shrine of Mount Eryx, where the Goddess's fetish was a golden honeycomb. Pythagoreans perceived the hexagon as an expression of the spirit of Aphrodite whose sacred number was six. She worshipped bees as her sacred creatures because they understood how to create perfect hexagons in their honeycomb. In Her temple at Eryx, the priestesses were melissae, "bees" and the Goddess herself was entitled Melissa, the Queen Bee.
Seeking to understand nature's secrets through geometry, the Pythagoreans meditated on the endless triangular lattice, all sixty-degree angles, that results from extending the sides of all hexagons in the honey comb diagram until their lines meet in the centers of adjacent hexagons. It seemed to them a revelation of the underlying symmetry of the cosmos.
The bee was usually looked upon as a symbol of the feminine potency of nature, because while creating a magical elixir, known for its preservation properties, they were also pollinating flowers, increasing plant fertility, and abundance.
Flanders 1500's. The hives were tall straw skeps with a flight entrance well above the base. The skeps were housed in a thatched shelter near the farm buildings. Pigs and poultry were kept near the hives. Women, children and men were involved in beekeeping activities and all wore protective clothing. Similar hives were used up to the 1900's. (The world history of beekeeping, by Eva Crane).A Flemish...
BRUSSELS – 25th and 26th JANUARY 2010
This pan European event is a collaboration between TippingPoint, the British Council, the European Commission, the European Union National Institutes for Culture (EUNIC), the European Economic and Social Committee (EESC) and the Kaaitheatre Theater in Brussels. A major European gathering of individuals from across the cultural sector, including artists from all art forms, together with a broad range of scientists involved in the world of climate science will take place, symbolically, at the heart of the European institutions, in the building of the EESC in the centre of Brussels. A number of key climate change policy makers will also take part.
TippingPoint aims to ‘harness the power of the imagination to help stabilise the climate’. We offer a range of activities centred on exposing creative artists to the enormous challenges of climate change; at the heart of this lies a series of meetings involving very high quality, intense dialogue between artists, scientists and others close to the heart of the issue. These encounters provide a chance to explore the broader cultural challenges precipitated by climate change.
Tipping Point or how to change the mentality of the world population? : conference report by Eva Peeters on the BAM-website 'Kunst en Ecologie'
MMKamp is an international 'artist residency' project based on collaboration between non-profit organizations, artists, tactical media activists and ones who don’t know yet what they are and don’t care much. MMKamp concept is an art and new media laboratory, platform for researching, new media experimenting and developing new artistic and communication forms, through self-initiated collaboration among international artists and new media workers.
Everything in Multimedia camp (Multimedijalni kamp - MMKamp) is about freedom. Its about research how to become free through hacking, manipulating, communicating, living, networking, creating, developing… Sometimes its nice to research alone, sometimes you s...
We started to make a database of the wild plants and flowers that grow in our rooftopgardens. The plants are indigenous and their seeds are brought to our rooftop locations by the birds. All pictures are photographs from our own plants. The texts come from a guidebook on wild flowers, and give a taxonomy and a topology of the plant, as well as a description of its specific features, e.g. medicinal plant and/or other properties.
In MAHILA (women), the filmmaker steps between different worlds, going from West to East, from urban to rural surroundings. Her encounters with the experiences and observations of rural Rajasthani women provoke reflection on the process of empowerment. In an artistic ethnography we see and hear how they are using education, technology and politics to redefine their destinies. As we trace the film-maker's memories we are taken into questions about story-telling. How are the women fighting to get their stories heard? Can the filmmaker tell other women's stories?
screenings:
Signals from the South, Muu Gallery Helsinki 2009
Finnish Cultural Institute, Damascus , november 2009
Brigittines...
Annemie Maes is invited by Ana Valdés (Maraya.org) to present the Politics of Change project in Damascus, Syria. Presentations (lectures and screenings) are scheduled at the Finnish Cultural Institute in Damascus.
The Finnish Institute in Damascus, maintained by the Foundation of the Finnish Institute in the Middle East, is an academic institute, which promotes, in particular, the research and teaching of the languages, cultures and religions of the Middle East. The institute focuses its operation on the Arab world and its fringe areas with high cultural and historical significance. It has permanent representatives in Syria and Egypt.
okno's harvest day is set up as an open_lab where visitors can explore the projects conducted by artists and researchers in the open_green rooftopgardens. We will exchange ideas about the different processes of social and cultural issues related to the urban, green environment. We will share everyday procedures as cooking algorithms with ingredients forthcoming from the seasonal harvest of the connected urban gardens. We intend to explore via public discussions and onsite/online presentations the character, properties and the expressions of different natural processes.
download here plant-sheet 2009
The information mentions:
the origin of the (bio) seeds, sowing date, growth, potting date, planting date (outside), location in the rooftop garden, companion planting, flowers and fruits evolution, harvest, seed-harvest, pictures.
cours de jardinnage écologique aux Ateliers des Tanneurs
David (début des haricots) vous enseigne une fois par mois ce qu'il y a à faire au jardin en fonction des saisons, les légumes à cultiver, comment s'y prendre, trucs et astuces. Transmission de savoir-faire inspiré des enseignements de Gilbert Cardon (Fraternités Ouvrières asbl, Mouscron) et des techniques de permaculture.
Ouverts à toutes et tous, gratuit.
Lieu: 58, rue des Tanneurs - 1000 Bxl, dans les Marolles.
Un Belge qui ne râle pas, n'est pas un Belge. C'est bon pour la santé!Who is Gilbert Cardon and what is the Fraternité Ouvrière? C...
Een workshop in 9 voordrachtreeksen van de Imkersbond Brussel. Alle facetten van het beheer van een bijenvolk worden uitgelegd, vanaf de zwerm over de koningin, haar eileg, het broed , de werksters en de mannelijke bijen -de darren-, tot terug naar de zwerm.
adres : CC De Meent, Gemeenveld 34 Alsemberg 1652.
17/10/09 : bestuiving in open lucht (Dr. Michel Asperges)
21/11/09 : de evolutie van de bijenkast (Aloys van den Akker)
19/12/09 : bijenrassen (Roland Vaes)
16/01/10 : bijenwas, een architecturaal verhaal (Roland Vaes)
20/02/10 : evolutie van varroa - inzicht in bijenziekten (Leo Van Malderen)
20/03/10 : imkeren het hele jaar door (Frans Daems)
17/04/10 : moerteelt en zwermcel (Gaston...
Colony collapse disorder (CCD) or sometimes honey bee depopulation syndrome (HBDS) is a phenomenon in which worker bees from a beehive or European honey bee colony abruptly disappear. While such disappearances have occurred throughout the history of apiculture, the term colony collapse disorder was first applied to a drastic rise in the number of disappearances of Western honey bee colonies in North America in late 2006. Colony collapse is economically significant because many agricultural crops worldwide are pollinated by bees. European beekeepers observed similar phenomena in Belgium, France, the Netherlands, Greece, Italy, Portugal, and Spain, and initial reports have also come in from Switzerland...
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Timelapse movie of okno's open_green during the connected domes workshop.
Pad.ma is a web-based video archive, launched as a public website http://pad.ma in February 2009, that works primarily with footage and not finished films. Pad.ma's interface offers some exciting new ways in which moving images, timelines, text and maps can be linked. It offers a practical technical and legal framework through which footage can be shared. It makes an appeal for thinking about film and video "production" in a number of different ways: as a filmmaker publishing video that is not a film, as a film editor organising footage using the archive, as a writer across one or many video clips, as a scholarly researcher or film student contributing notes or using links to clips as references,...
The idea is to detect bio feedback of plants from the okno open_green, send these data from the garden (over a radio frequency connection) into okno_inside, transform them into generative music and stream them over the okno_radio.
After a collective brainstorm, different parts of the project are setup and worked out by different people. At the end everything fits into one project.
We discussed possibilities to measure subtle activities of plants and create a human/plant interaction. We discovered that all plants in the open_green are showing a highly complex biodynamic response to their environment.
We conducted experiments to try and find out how plants react to wind, air pressure, touch, light,...
At the left hand a snapshot of the so-on_hive, populated with Buckfast bees. At the right hand, a snapshot of the okno_hive, populated with European Black bees.
The Buckfast bee is popular among beekeepers and is available from bee breeders in several parts of the world. Most of their qualities are very favorable. They are extremely gentle. Their main drawback is that they are very liberal in their application of propolis to inner surfaces...
Part 1 of the Connected Domes-workshops, the building of Geodesic Domes out of recycled materials, will be held at OKNO from august 10th till august 14th.
The workshop will be facilitated by Dirk Hendrickx, co-founder of the artist collective Maquette.
Part 2 of the Connected Domes-workshops will be led by the media artists Audrey Samson (Rotterdam) and Stefanie Wuschitz (Vienna) and takes place from august 17 till august 21st.
"Imagine living outdoors indoors in a transparant dome, picking organically grown vegetables right in your kitchen, sleeping in a bed under luxuriant trees, comfortable regardless of the weather outside.
Your autonomous garden home is heated and cooled by the sun, which also provides electricity and heats water.
…
Your Garden of Eden captures, treats, and recycles it’s own water.
…
the plants provide the oxygen-rich, clean air of a forest.
There is no connection to city power, water or sewage systems. It is truly organic architecture."
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Honeybees returning to the hive with pollen on their hind legs..
Bees are adapted for feeding on nectar and pollen, the former primarily as an energy source and the latter primarily for protein and other nutrients. Most pollen is used as food for larvae.
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Noise pollution at my place (brussels, center) as visualized by Michal Kinderlay, Czech media-artist, during his residency at okno.
During the month of august, so-on will organize for okno 2 workshops dealing with the topics of media ecology, mobile- and networked architecture.
Connected Domes #01 consists of building greenhouse geodesic domes out of recycled materials as there are: newspapers, scrap metal, twigs, bamboo ...
Connected Domes #02 will populate the greenhouses with wild plants, sprouts shooting up out of homemade compost. The plants will act as a print, a mirror of the greenlife of so-on's garden over the last year.
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Short screenshotmovie from the webcam pointing into the okno beehive.
Installation of the colony: july 2nd 2009.
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Snapshot of the birth of 2 bees in the so-on hive. Most of the cells are closed and contain pupa's to be born soon. Open cells contain pollen and honey to feed the larvae.
Within the central brood nest, a single frame of comb will typically have a central disk of eggs, larvae and sealed brood cells which may extend almost to the edges of the frame. Immediately above the brood patch an arch of pollen-filled cells extends from side to side, and above that again a broader arch of honey-filled cells extends to the frame...
Screenings at HUMlab, the Conference room
Annemie Maes and Goedele Verleysen
Starting with the screening of the movie 'MAHILA' (about the women solar engineers of Barefoot College India) followed by the screening of the film of Goedele Verleysen (on the role of the women in the political situation in Bolivia). A more detailed presentation on the projects will follow the screenings.
This will be followed by a more detailed presentation on the projects, and a discussion starting from a list of questions....
The Eclectic Tech Carnival is a gathering of women with a critical interested in Free Information and Open Standards technology. The event creates an opportunity for women to network, exchange skills and have fun! It's been held at least once a year since 2002, each time in a place where there is a group of women intersted and willing to host and organise it. Its roots are in the Genderchangers hardware and FLOSS courses.
Women from all over the world organise the /ETC through mailing lists, IRC chat and IRL (in real life) meetings. While the main focus is to attract local women to participate, the reality is that women (and gender minorities) travel from all over the world to participate in...
Saturday we installed the first bee colony on so-on's rooftop. We = Christina Stadlbauer - the bee-girl, Bartaku - her devoted bee-keeper, Giván Bela - visitor in time, and myself - the affectionate host.
The colony consists of a starters-amount of 20.000 bees, most of them black city bees completed by a few thousand carnica bees. Over time the colony will grow and we installed some devices to monitor their activity and behaviour.
Will they visit their friends, installed in the okno-hives, some 500 meters away? Will they mix and mingle and what will be the taste of the honey they'll produce: a flavour of curry and lavender or will they go for the sugared city fast food: lemonades and coke?
We'll keep you posted with bee-stories over spring and summer ...
For a complete picture-overview of the first and second attempts of transfer and installation, check: http://thoughtsandtalks.so-on.be/photo-albums/ and click the 'city bees album'.
In addition a contribution out of Giván Bela's research:
"The Bee Boy’s Song by Rudyard Kipling"
BEES! Bees! Hark to your bees !
“Hide from your neighbours as much as you please,
But all that has happened, to us you must tell,
Or else we will give you no honey to sell!”
CONCEPT
The Bee Observatory project transforms 2 roof top gardens located in the center of Brussels at about half a kilometer
distance from each other into communicating vessels. The approach is to install hives in both of the gardens,with black honeybees (apis mellifera mellifera), a type endemic to Belgium.
It is expected that the bees will manage to bridge the spatial distance and to associate the locations by going about their business and natural processes within their individual yet overlapping territories. The presence and activities of the bee colonies makes the gardens interconnect and interfere. The emerging inter-space can be perceived as place of encounters and neighborhood.
Observing...
May 1st, Labour Day, my computer and me made this short experimental movie: 'pw:betelgeuse, portrait of a young moroccan woman at okno'.
Big HardDisk didn't like the footage too much, and I had to call Little HardDisk for help to bring it to a displayable result.
[flashvideo filename=https://so-on.annemariemaes.net/SO-ON/films/move1day/pw_betelgeuse-klein.flv height=262 width=448 image=https://so-on.annemariemaes.net/SO-ON/films/move1day/pw_betelgeuse.jpg /]
I tried to apply a respectfull approach towards the portraying of people in Islamic culture, and at the same time take the digital culture of Okno into account.
Big HD made the selection of the images and gave them their specific rythm...
Move for a Day is taking place during the Micronomics Festival in Brussels. Therefore some non-profit organiations, buisnesses and micro-initiatives will swap their work places with each other.
5 minutes movie made by Indymedia on the move1day-activities:
(click the image to link to the indymedia site).
More information can be downloaded on David Helbich's blog.
A slideshow of the event we be presented at Micronomics festival.
More pictures about the Movie1Day-project:
http://thoughtsandtalks.so-on.be/photo-albums/, select move1day-album.
From 27th to 29th March 2009 the Course "Grandmother's University" was held at the Navdanya Vidya Peeth campus in Derhadun. About 30 female farmer's from Uttaranchal, Uttrakand and Maharashtra and 20 western students gathered together to celebrate woman's work and knowledge through attending interactive lectures.
Dr. Vandana Shiva conducted a session on Women and Agriculture in which she stated that throughout history keeping seeds has been mostly women's business.
Some visions and inspirations behind the Navdanya Biodiversity Conservation Farm. Ideas that contribute to the strenghtening and the growing of the Organic Movement.
Navdanya creates alternatives to the corporate globalization, and this at every level of the foodchain. Nature centered and people centered alternatives based on the organic way can provide health and food security for as well the poor as the rich (malnutrition and diabetes).
Navdanya positions itself as a public health movement, a sustainable living movement and a retail democracy movement.
Everything is connected. The seeds they save and grow in their own farms, the soil that they junvenate through biodiverse ecological farming methods; the organic and artisanal processing through which they conserve and enhance the taste and wholesomeness of food, and the direct marketing model of retail though which they bring organic products from the field to the table.
The ‘Alternative Economy Cultures’ (alt.econ.cult) programme on April 3rd & 5th brings together leading international and Finnish thinkers, cultural practitioners and activists, to present alternative economic visions.
The seminar aims to tackle not just the financial, but the social, cultural, institutional, human, material, emotional and intellectual forms of capital. Not just about individual gain, boosting, balancing or bail-outs, but common good, peer-to-peer, shared wealth and appropriate reward for effort involved.
Cultural production and social-networking, especially the digital online versions of the recent decade, have promoted new ideas of wealth, opportunity, scarcity, and exchange. Imp...
Pixelache 09 features a seminar (in Finnish) and a series of presentations and discussions (in English) related to theme Art, Science & Ecology.
This theme aims to bring together local and international environmental scientists and artists. The programme will feature presentations about recent art/science collaborations and discussions about working methods and shared interests.
We will also explore what could be done with the real-time energy consumption data recently released by Helsingin Energia (see below) together with the participants of Digital Craftsmanship and Audiovisual Hacking themes.
info:...
With the urban garden project we want to blend the natural and the digital world in one and the same eco-system. Can natural evolution be generated, controlled, enhanced or imagined in artworks? Is our environment programmable? How does the fusion of natural and artificial matter produce new organisms, new environments, new natures? How does technology animate nature and space, and how do users and programs animate matter?
workshop -- part1 : the natural setting/ designing the urban garden
friday, march 6 - 10 am @ okno
This is a Fo.am/OKNO collaboration!
Part I: the natural setting (the urban garden, permaculture)
Can we talk about ‘permaculture’, as an intrinsic part of this media-ecological system? What is Permaculture? Permaculture is about designing human environments that have the stability, diversity and resilience of natural ecosystems. Permaculture integrates renewable energy systems, energy efficiency, food/gardening systems, natural building, rainwater harvesting, urban planning along with the economic, political and social policies that make sustainable living possible and practical.
Winter Camp is an event, organized by the Institute of Network Cultures and will take place 3-7 March ‘09 in Amsterdam. Network Cultures Winter Camp will be a mix of presentations and work spaces with an emphasis on getting things done. It will be a four-day program of work spaces and plenary presentations, in which a dozen networks can work on their specific current topics.
Left, the smithy of the Barefoot Solar Cooker Engineers in Tilonia, Rajasthan. Right, a solar energy project in the desert of New Mexico.
Under some diagrams on the horizontal and vertical sunlight-tracking for the Scheffler-system, as used for the Barefoot Solar Cookers.
Cuisine Interne Keuken started by Constant out of the desire to render visible the internal organisation of the cultural world we work in, with its written and unwritten laws, decision making processes and value systems. In our thinking about interdisciplinary cultural practices, we did not want to leave out.
For Politics of Change, the old project is presented and extended.
Conceptually the questionnaire is updated; a new set of questions is developed by scratching out some of the old questions and introducing new ones relating to the collective interest of Politics of Change. The self(definition) is a central issue, in relation to a wider discoursce on art, activism and technology.
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skype-interview from Delhi with Lipika Bansal, researcher and educator at Waag Society Amsterdam.
streaming movie -- 12:30 // free art license CIK.
I am Lipika Bansal. Born, raised and based in Amsterdam from Indian origin. I studied international communications and science and technology studies. During both studies I looked at the influence of technology on society. My first study focused on ICT in developing countries and my second study looked into technologies such as biometrics and rfid and the acceptance in society of these privacy sensitive tools.
I am in India, in a small village, where an ashram has been built for women and girls to learn about their right to be educated.
As with all the houses in the village, the ashram is made out of clay. Slogans are painted onto the walls to help boost the revolutionary spirit of the place.
"Lack of knowledge is the cause of fear," You can kill the body but never the spirit," Work is worship."
The ashram also serves as ground zero for a group of poor farmers attempting to seize land from the wealthy, large landowners who live in the cities. The farmers have successfully seized 20,000 acres.
The man in charge of this struggle was educated in Deli, and his philosophy of land ownership is derived not from Marx, but rather from the true democracy established by tribal systems-particularly the Iroquois constitution, which historically is the document on which America's constitution is based.
Today I am remembered as ghost, bloodsucker, banshee who fooled the camera because I have no reflection. I could go underground and no one would notice, fool Interpol and travel the globe: Johannesburg, Brussels, New York. I learned from Matsumoto to burn the tips of my fingers in order to rip off my prints. I learned to look into one person’s face and see the world. I saw myself in the world, and traveled through people’s faces. I am a ghost, and they are aliens. We are all aliens in our own home towns. There is no record of me. My passport shows me blurred into the background. I am dream-man, and I have oceans in my mind. I had a dream about a book thick and old, called UFO stories. I pulled it from the shelf and instantly knew aliens were asking me questions. They wanted to know about my home town in the global village but I couldn’t read the words:
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Women from several African and Asian countries in a training/workshop in India learning about photovoltaic solar energy.
streaming movie -- 02:30 // free art license CIK.
Sinds september 2008 organiseert Globe Aroma kooksessies met de bewoners van het Klein Kasteeltje. Tijdens deze workshops vertelden dezen over de sociale en culturele gebruiken die met hun specifieke kook- en eetprocessen verbonden zijn.
Op 18/19 en 20 december werd het concept publiek opengesteld op de binnenkoer van het Klein Kasteeltje.
Daarvoor werd samen met de kunstenaars van Time Circus een multifunctionele...
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Interview with Rose Akumu, as part of the Politics of Change project.
streaming movie -- 04:30 // free art license CIK.
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skype-interview with Jasna Dimitrovska, as part of the Politics of Change project.
streaming movie -- 11:07 // free art license CIK.
Hi, my name is Jasna. I studied World literature in Skopje. I’m Macedonian, In my free time I’m a street artists and an activist.
I like to think of myself as an engaged artist, that’s why I choose the street as my exhibiting space.
I think art and technology and activism are all interconnected, so I like to realize my goals with whatever tool I can use, no borders!
Politics of Change is a research project in which artists, theorists and activists reflect on innovative ideas, contributions and solutions which support distributed and grassroot structures. This reflection takes place through a program of free discussion and dialogue and is documented in a multimedia archive-installation.
The focus is on the role of women at the core of these communities.
Drawing on a wide range of artistic and theoretical approaches, the aim is to imagine new and sustainable relationships between humans, their environments and (appropriate) technologies.
The Fab Lab (fabrication laboratory) is a small scale workshop with the tools to make almost anything. This includes technology-enabled products generally perceived as limited to mass production.
While Fab Labs have yet to compete with mass production and its associated economies of scale in fabricating widely distributed products, they have already shown the potential to empower individuals to create smart devices for themselves. These devices can be tailored to local or personal needs in ways that are not practical or economical using mass production.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fab_lab
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interview with Sarju Bhanwar Gopal Panwar, handicraft designer at Barefoot College, Rajasthan, India.
streaming movie -- 04:30
My name is Sarju, I'm 50 years old and I work at Barefoot College since 1981. I lead the handicraft department. I never got a proper training as a designer. I learned everything myself, and now I teach other women. I get my inspiration for the designs out of our daily life. I’ve never seen any books, I work with my imagination.
David Graves, beekeeper inNew York City.
His rooftop hosts one of the 15 beehives he keeps on roofs around New York City.
[flashvideo filename=https://so-on.annemariemaes.net/SO-ON/bees/NY-rooftop-bees.flv height=240 width=426 /]
Woman in pink with a covered head is joined by her husband. They stand next to each other and are then asked to sit down by camera person. Children in the background.
Husband and wife sort packets of plastic bags inside their home as their grand children watch television in the background. Another man comes to help them out. He takes a stack of packets, walks outside the house and loads them onto the cycle. Various zoom ins to the piles of plastic.
psycho-(wheatpasties)
Street art is any art developed in public spaces.
The motivations and objectives that drive street artists are as varied as the artists themselves. There is a strong current of activism and subversion in urban art. Street art can be a powerful platform for reaching the public, and frequent themes include adbusting, subvertising and other culture jamming, the abolishment of private property and reclaiming the streets.
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Thursday, september 11th, I met this gypsy women in Skopje. She was sitting on the sidewalk of a big street, and she was shouting and screaming as if she gave a very personal performance. Nobody of the passers by gave her any attention. I was struck by her behaviour. Completely free, the street was clearly...
GROUP EXHIBITION I SCREENING PROGRAM I PUBLIC INTERVENTIONS
LECTURES I WORKSHOPS I LIVE A/V PERFORMANCES
Upgrade! is an international, emerging network of autonomous nodes united by art, technology, and a commitment to bridging cultural divides. Its decentralized, non-hierarchical structure ensures that Upgrade! operates according to local interests and their available resources; and reflects current creative engagement with cutting edge technologies. While individual nodes present new media projects, engage in informal critique, and foster dialogue and collaboration between individual artists, Upgrade! International functions as an online, global network that gathers annually in different cities to meet one another, showcase local art, and work on the agenda for the following year. Upgrade! Brussels/Ghent is represented by Annemie Maes and Eva De Groote.
The 3rd Upgrade! International meeting Chain Reaction will take place in Skopje, Macedonia from September 11th to 14th, 2008. Growing from the Upgrade! International community, this event takes the form of a city-wide digital art and networked culture festival including exhibitions, screenings, live local and streamed performances and a program of critical and active lectures and workshops exploring numerous facets in the field of digital art.
OKNO and FoAM invite you to the lecture and demonstration moment
++++ HOW TO SET UP A ROOFTOP GARDEN ++++
The "what?" "why?" and "how?" about rooftop gardens
- an introduction by ibic.be -
Whether on one-story structures or on skyscrapers, rooftop gardens are heavens with a charm of their own.
They provide private worlds in which to grow plants and from which to escape from the bustling city life. They enhance the air quality, contribute to hydrological sustainability, provide play space, shade and shelter and merely just a living, green area.
Wednesday, August 27, 2008 - from 2.30pm till 6pm
FoAM/OKNO, Koolmijnenkaai 30/34 - 4th floor, 1080 brussels
A city is a construction in space over a long timespan.
All experiences are related, all senses are mixed. Stories, sounds and images are contextualised into a dynamic database. The growth of the city is a continuous succession of phases.
The city as a shifting entity: from the frantic movement of rush hour madness to the slow giant's pace of urban development, movement is the defining feature of a metropolitan environment.
The third international Upgrade gathering will be taking place in Skopje, Macedonia, September 11-14, 2008.
Chain Reaction is the annual exhibition and symposium presented by the Upgrade! International organization for 2008. The gathering, which will involve curators and artists from the Upgrade nodes that are working in 27 cities, and which is aimed at both fostering inter-network communication and collaboration as well as exposure of art and ideas to a broad public audience. In Skopje the gathering incorporates an exhibition, symposium and publication as well as a programme of screenings and performances.
Thursday august 7th 2008, we will meet in the conflict room and discuss the pamphlet 'design your own utopia'. This publication encourages us to rethink our social model on a social, political, economical and philosophical level. A concrete question sheet helps you to sharpen your ideas, values, desires and relationships towards others. It creates a mental space to tune your expectations if you are dreaming about a common something…
Thursday 24 july 10 women (and 3 man) gatered at okno to build solar cookers. It was a sunny day, luckily.
In 2 hours time we built 3 umbrella-cookers and 3 fun-panel/cookit cookers. We started some cooking tests around 4.30 pm. The sunmoved fast and we had to adjust the cookers all the time. Than came the wind and he blew our pots away. Finally we cooked a simple meal on okno's electric plates.
For pictures, go the the photo-album page and select solar_cooking: brussels.
Sofie, Marthe, Shelbatra, Wendy, Billy, Tina, Sara, Christina, Audrey, Annemie, Wouter, Fabrice and Rene.
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Mangi Devi. Educator.
streaming video -- 03:20
My Name is Mangi Devi, I am a resident of Tilonia village. The Tillonia organisation ‘Barefoot College’ is about 30 years old now . I have worked in four different departments. I started in the handicraft section and now I am in the education department.
My fathers village is about 35 kms away from here, it’s called Bhiwanwadi. I was illiterate when I arrived here and the organization provided me with education and now I am literate. I belong to the Barwasamaj caste, people from this caste usually are into fieldwork and farming.
I don’t remember when I got married, it was a child-marriage. It was not common to give a dowry in our caste. My family gave a few small items but my in-laws were not asking for money.They wanted the girl and it was good so. My in laws are good and till this date me and my husband don’t fight. We work independently.
My husbands’ name is Tejaram. He works in Kishangar and he has no issues with the organisation here. He is very supportive and we don’t interfere in each others professional life. It has been said that a car has 4 wheels and if one wheel doesn’t work then car doesn’t move and my life with him has been like that.
I have 2 sons and they also have kids who are 28 and 25 years of age. And I have an older daughter too. I am a great-grandmother. I am about 55 years old.
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Nazma Nigam. Solar Lighting Engineer.
streaming video -- 01:20
From the villagers I heard about a project providing work to illiterate women. When I came here I was scared because I never went to school. But people were I had to leave home early to come to work and traveling was difficult. My in-laws were not liking it as I gave not enough time to my children. After a while they agreed with the fact that I could stay on the campus with my children.
I started at Barefoot as a gardener but I needed more money to raise my kids. In the solar section they were looking for more people to help them with the village solar lighting systems I applied for that department and I started the training.
I followed the complete solar training. They explained me the colors of the circuit and after a while I understood the concept.
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Magan Kawar. Solar Lighting Engineer.
streaming video -- 01:40
I belong to the Rajput-caste. The Rajput kings and queens were very rich, but there are also poor Rajputs.
My husband got to know about Barefoot College through a village politician and he came here to have a look. He really liked the College approach and he decided to stay. I followed my husband to Barefoot.
I got a lot of reactions from my village people that I wanted to get out of the purdah-system. Rajput woman are supposed to stay their whole life behind the purdah-curtain and are not allowed to see or meet other people. But I decided to go for the training anyway.
My family and my in-laws were afraid I wouldn’t be able to combine work, taking care of the kids and the household. But I convinced them that I would do everything to handle work and family and to manage all my work. And with the support of my husband I started my job at the college.
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Sarju Bhanwar Gopal Panwar. Handicrafts Designer.
streaming video -- 03:40
My name is Sarju, I'm 50 years old and I work at Barefoot College since 1981. I lead the handicraft department. I never got a proper training as a designer. I learned everything myself, and now I teach other women. I get my inspiration for the designs out of our daily life. I’ve never seen any books, I work with my imagination.
I’m born and brought up in Tilonia. When I got married I moved to a village 25 km from here. My native language is Marwari, but I speak also our national language Hindi and some English words as well. I belong to the Darji-caste, as well as my husband. I studied till the 5th grade, afterwards I went working.
I’m married for many years now. I was 13 when my parents arranged my marriage. Now (some) girls can choose themselves whom to marry. My parents didn’t have to give a dowry. My in-laws accepted me as their daughter and both families spent an equal amount on the wedding.
Presented as a preview for our upcoming-series
‘creative eco/techno gardening forgirlsandboys' (2009-...) :
the cook, the artist, the engineer and their urban garden;
OKNO/so-on invites you to participate in the mini-DIY-workshop:
++++ HOW TO BUILD A SOLAR COOKER ++++thursday 24 july 2008 at OKNO, 01pm till 6pm
en petit comité
drinks available, food only if we succeed!
free entrance for women and transgender (boys, be inventive!)
what?
A Solar Cooker is a device that allows you to cook food using the sun's energy as fuel.
why?
+ Solar cooking is the simplest, safest, most convenient way to cook food without consuming fuels. But for hundreds of millions of people around the world who cook over fires fueled by wood, solar cooking is more than a choice.
+ Moderate cooking temperatures in simple solar cookers help preserve nutrients.
+ Smoke from cooking fires is a major cause of global warming.
+ Many solar cookers are portable, allowing for solar cooking at work sites or while pursuing outdoor activities like picnics, trekking or camping.
+ and so much more … read:
Technology is a valuable input for social transformation, but the most important force is human agency and creativity: the microlevel initiatives and everyday activities of real human beings.
In following interviews the Barefoot Solar Engineers talk about their visions, methods and sources of inspiration to shape their future and bring social transformation.
For full interviews and background information, check the links on the playlist.
Scroll down for complete selection: Rami, Mangi, Leela, Magan, Sita, Shamma, Sargu and Nazma.
Check the links on the playlist for more info on the videos.
Scroll down for complete selection.
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Fifty years ago, if you wanted to see where the action was in India, you went to the villages. Today, you go to the cities. What makes Bombay overpopulated is the impoverishment of the countryside, so that a young man with dreams in his head will take the first train to Bombay to live on the footpath. If you fix the problems of the villages, you fix as a happy side-effect, the problems of the cities.
rami by so-on is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.0 Belgium License.
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Rami Devi. Activist and coordinator women empowerment groups.
streaming video -- 06:40
My name is Rami Devi. My age is around 35 years. I don’t profess a specific religion. Praying all day wouldn’t bring any food to my stomach. I don’t believe in blind fate anymore. One cannot grasp god and force him to put food in your mouth. So for me there is first work and than god.
I know that the last years I realised a lot of changes for myself. Earlier I would not have been able to sit here on this bed, facing the camera. I would have been sitting on the floor with my dupatta over my face. But today I can sit like this, facing you and speak out my mind freely.
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Shamma Jogi. Solar Cooker Engineer.
streaming video -- 03:40
The main problem for our poverty is water. We all work as farmers and without rain there’s no harvest and no money. Nobody of my family or in-laws is educated. I took the decision to go a few years to nightschool, as I felt the need to learn and during daytime I had to work on the fields.
My husband is a truckdriver. He supports me completely in my decision to work. We need to feed our children. It’s important to give them a decent future with a good education. That’s why I decided to come to Barefoot, because of the jobs.
My husband is happy that I feel good in this community. The money I earn helps us for paying our expenses.
Since I got married I worked in the house. The people from Barefoot came to the villages to talk about their program. They spoke about solar lighting and handicrafts and education. My in-laws asked if they could teach me solar lighting so that I could bring electricity to the village as we don’t have light there. My in-laws were very supportive, they understood Barefoot was an interesting place for learning.
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Sita Bai :: Solar Cooker Engineer
streaming video -- 03:40
In the villages there still is a lot of discrimination. On the level of castes, on the level of male dominance.
There are many clashes with the vllagers. As I’m from a lower cast, they don’t allow me to eat with them. They even don’t let me sit next to them. Or come close to dried cow dung.
Than they say that I spoil their fuel.
The villagers are also jealous. They see that I educated myself and that I became an independent lady.
I wonder where all this fuzz about high and low castes comes from. After all we are all the same human beings.
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Leela Devi :: Solar Lighting Engineer.
streaming video -- 01:40
I am a teacher and a student and a student and a teacher.
My husband used to work at the College. I came along with him.
Our parents arranged our marriage long before my husband started his further studies. At that time there was no item of getting a more educated wife. His family liked me and my family liked him for me. The education-level difference between us was no point, as the arrangement was not based on education. Now I can discuss problems with my husband. He’s very supportive. If I don’t understand something he explains me.
I started to work in the handicraft section before I asked myself to be transferred to the solar department. I wanted to learn something new, completely different from what I used to do. Stitching every woman can do. But solar was completely new when I came here. In the beginning I never thought I would never be able to understand it, but now I feel very comfortable and I like doing it.
The okno-session on sustainable networks spreads out over the totality of the xmedk-media ecologies week, from april 20 till april 25.
This workshop week at PAF, St.Erme/FR is the final touch of a month-long research into sustainable meshnetworks. It's the cherry on the cake of a long research.
At the St.Erme/Okno studio we organise mini-workshops that cover following topics:
- setting up a mesh network with the asus-routers
- flashing the asus routers with linux (kamikaze)
- connecting arduino's to the asus
- the choice of sensors and connecting them to the arduinos
- reading and interpreting the sensordata with python
- power the network with alternative energy:
- build a custommade windmill for the physical location
- integrate existing solarpanels
- run artistic projects on the sustainable network
pictures of the xmedk-st.erme-sessions in april 2008:
xmedk - day01, 2008xmedk - day02, 2008xmedk - day03, 2008 or you can download the pdf of the sustainable networks-report by clicking this link.
"[T]here are other things that need doing, and one of these is the development of an imaginary of technology, an understanding of its poetics and a testing manifestation of those poetics in ways that allow us to think and sense through what that technology is." -- Matt Fuller
Following the path laid out in "Towards an Ecology of MediaEcology" FoAM, Nadine and OKNO will conclude the .x-med-k. series with a final workshop in Saint Erme, France.
In this workshop, the three organisations explore media and media technologies as an ecosystem, deeply networked. At an isolated location in the Champagne region, participants will gather for a week of workshops, reflection...
Interview with Bunker Roy, co-founder of the Barefoot College (by Rocketboom).
Interview with Vandana Shiva, eco-feminist and founder of the Navdanya organisation.
Barefoot Solar Engineers in Hyderabad, Andhra Pradesh (by Neeta Lal).
Scroll down for complete selection.
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We wanted to set up a rural technological centre. A campus built only on green technologies.
We started to develop the solar section in 1988, funded with the royalties from the book The City of Joy. We were told about the advantages of photovoltaic solar panels to bring electricity to remote villages. We wanted to set up an open concept that everybody understood, so we started with trainings. The purpose was to inform all the rural people and tell them how we could upgrade our standards of living together.
I started to learn about solar systems: understanding photovoltaic panels, the batteries, production and maintenance. That time I was teaching science and maths in the night schools, and the project gave me the opportunity to learn about new techniques. I got more and more interested in the matter.
Today I have trained more than 400 Barefoot women solar engineers.
For video-interview with Vandana Shiva, check the category 'media'.
"The primary threat to nature and people today comes from centralising and monopolising power and control. Not until diversity is made the logic of production will there be a chance for sustainability, justice and peace. Cultivating and conserving diversity is no luxury in our times: it is a survival imperative." Vandana Shiva
Vandana Shiva is one of the world's most dynamic and provacative thinkers. A physicist, ecologist, and activist, she won...
Summer 2006, a few months after I met Mr. Vasu Srinivasan at the Luminous Green Symposium organised by foAM, I decided to develop a project on the Women Engineers of the Barefoot College and the Women of Tilonia.
Diving into the matter, I quickly made up that a documentary movie had to become the central issue in the project. My interest for the women Solar Engineers and the Mahila Samiti women of Tilonia comes out of a personal involvement that links art, women empowerment, ecology, technology and social engagement.
Introduced to the Barefoot College project, I was struck by certain similarities between my own relatively protected work environment and the specificities of the trainings/workshops in Rajasthan.
Brussels
Okno, a Brussels-based artist-run organisation for media, art and technology, focuses on social art and community-based technological research projects. To be more specific: current projects research the implementation of sustainable energies as solar/photovoltaic and wind energy in community-based city- and meshnetworks and public space art projects.
Belgian and international artists work together in a DIY-approach and during the decentralised workshops the sharing of knowledge is an important factor to come to valuable results.
Tilonia
The solar engineer training at Barefoot College, India has a similar structure: productivity results from collective work; the learning environment is open and decentralised and knowledge is passed on in a bottom-up and hands-on way.
From start on, the decision to step into the solar project is community-based. The village selects and delegates its future women engineers for a 6 months training, and every village family engages itself to pay its share in the remuneration of the engineers to set up and maintain the village solar system. January 2008 I went a first time to Barefoot College to meet and interview the solar engineers. There I discovered that the solar workshops are only a very small part in a much bigger story concerning the empowerment of the women in question.
The training is non-structured and informal, incorporating on-the-job learning while earning.
- learning from doing and mutual interaction, not through formal classroom teaching
- emphasis on practical experience; little or no importance given to paper qualifications
- the belief is that the educational system today cannot judge the worth and value of persons. Passing exams, getting degrees is no guarantee that they are either valuable or necessary for the development of rural communities. The crucial question is: can they work with their hands?
- to prevent environmental degradation and to make communities sustainable, the answer is for them to finally depend on each other and use existing village skills for their own development.
- Tilonia's role is to facilitate a process that allows for self reliance, self respect and dignity. It is not to increase dependency on urban professionals and skills.
Workshops
Through a series of workshops we will explore the wireless network, its technology, topology, implementation and usability. The series of workshops will be closing with a one week hands-on workshop where the participants will work together building a temporary wireless network, connecting clients to it and sending all sorts of data over the network.
mesh networks workshop: 21-27 january 2008
windpower workshop (DIY): 20-21 february 2008
closing workshop - artmeshnetwork: 19-26 april / st.erme, France
Self sustainable units
The unit(s) will be made self sustainable by the use of solar or wind power and because they are using wireless technology there is no need for any demand of infrastructure on the location(s) where these units will be positioned.
The location of the units is very important for the choice of the alternative energy source that will be used. In Brussels we should defenitely opt for the wind turbine (or a hybird system with solar) while on other locations solar would be a better choice.
Since we have 2 working units (for now), it would be good to rig one with a wind turbine and the other with a solar system.
In the case of a wind turbine the choice of which type of turbine depends on how steady the wind is on the location. When the winds are directional steady a horizontal turbine needs to be used, when there is a lot of turbulant wind a vertical turbine needs to be used.
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The bat mosque (Khirki Masjid) in Khirki Village, Delhi South.
The monumental mosque dates from 1380 and the domes in the ceiling are filled with bats. They make these funny noises, as they were humans quarreling with each other ...
For videos on the nightschools and eductation, check the category 'media'.
Nightschools are set up to give working children a chance on education. Most of the pupils are girls whom in daytime have to herd the cattle or fetch water for the households. After their daytime jobs, they attend the nightschool from 7pm till 9.30pm. The girls, between 6 and 13 years of age, reacted all in a very shy way on our visit. It took them a while to regain their natural behaviour and to forget our presence.
Est-ce qu'il se passe autre chose, quand on est dans le documentaire et qu'une femme, un homme, un enfant vous confient...
Sita Bai is one of the Barefoot SolarCooker Engineers. Together with 3 other women she runs the solar-cooker section of the College.
Some years ago she decided to start a 6 months training as solar panel engineer, and she continued her education with a focus on solar cookers.
Today the women are responsible for the construction of the large parabolic dishes, covered with regular pieces of mirror.
They tailor them precisely according to the blueprints of a German Engineer, Wolfgang...
For videos on the solar workshops, check the category 'media'.
At Barefoot College, ordinary men and women -whatever their qualifications- can learn about solar energy. Roles have to be flexible: the teacher can be the learner and the learner can be the teacher.
The whole environment is one of creative learning, demystifying technology and unlearning through processes that are natural, non violent and respectful.
At present time, 32 Buthanese girls and 6 Mauretanian women follow a 6 months training to become a solar engineer in their home villages.
They are selected by their...
For a video-presentation of the Barefoot College, check the category 'media'.
Tilonia is a very small village in the middel of the Rajasthan desert, about 650 km south-west of Delhi. Barefoot College was founded here in the early '70-ties.
What makes it unique and different to all other centres of 'learning and unlearning', is its approach: it has devalued and rejected the urban professionals produced by the formal education system.
Over the years it became clear what exactly is unlearnt: the extent to which was underestimated the infinite capacity and competence of the people to identify and solve their own problems, by means of their own skills and mutual trust without relying on strangers' skills and knowledge from outside.
Nearly three decades ago, the Barefoot People started putting Ghandian ideas into practice, not knowing weather their own 'Experiments with Truth' would work because they sounded so simple and yet so difficult.
The basic Gandhian concepts and principles of simplicity and austerity have stood the test of time. People live and eat together. People sit on the floor at Barefoot, and work. People in this College clean their own dishes, sweep their own floors and do voluntary work to keep the Centre clean. Everybody is equal. The ideas, values, humanity and compassion of the people are in focus. The lifestyle of Barefoot College harbours the spirit of a Gandhian ashram.
Interaction with the rural community has taught to respect the natural elements like water and sun. Since 1986 the Barefoot College runs solely on solar energy. Computers, telephone-lines, lighting for residencies and offices, water distribution, laboratory and maternity centre are run on power that comes from the sun. The nightschools for kids are provided with lighting from solar lanterns. Rainwater is collected in underground tanks. No water is wasted.
After the 7.30 am breakfast, chapati's and chai, Ramniwas takes me on a tour around the new Barefoot Campus. Explaining the Barefoot approach, the 14 programmes, he makes me visit all different sections and introduces me to the people responsible for their section.
Everything starts with a hands on education. Educated people don't have to be necessarely litterate. One can function on an equal level in society by taking responsability on his/her job in an hands-on way. One of the most important Barefoot approaches to get people aware of their rights and to give them information, is the puppettheatre. By taking these selfmade avatars to the villages, they construct real-life situations to which the villagepeople can actively respond and interact.
The sleepertrain to Ajmer (endstation Jaipur) is OK. AC2, 1280Rs for 1200 km, leaves Bomay at 9pm. Waking up, a dry, red, ondulating landscape shows up through the window, some mountains on the background. Waiters are running back and forth with masala chai, coffee, water, juice, vegetable cutlets, sweets -- and you can get a 'trainmade' lunch at noon. It's a 'stop train' so it slides ... slowly, slowly, slowly. The doors never close, everybody can jump off and on. We pass Gujarat and enter Rajasthan. Landscape becomes dryer, with here and there a tree or some bush and cactus. Mustardseed fields are boarding the railway, peacocks are proudly walking by.
4.30pm, Ajmer. Not immediately an attractive...
Last day in Bombay before taking the nighttrain to Ajmer. In the Taj Bookshop, I buy ' How to teach yourself Hindi'. I hope it will be usefull at Barefoot College. I can try to set up a basic conversation with the women. At 7pm I take a taxi to Bandra Terminal. The distance is 20 km, and it's a 1 to 1:30 hour ride, due to rush hour. My polution-portion for today is certainly not less than 5 packs of sigarettes.
I take the bus to Crawford market, but as it's sunday everything is closed. I wander through the muslim quarters and the call for the midday prayers fills the streets. Children have fun on a merry-go-round, and ride wooden horses named Mumbai, Delhi. Culcata, and so-on. The maidans are filled with cricket players and families lingering around on the vaste green lawns. I walk back to Fort, the large avenues are rather empty compared to Bombay norms. A nescafe milkshake in the Yoko restaurant is a tasty refreshment. I keep it modest, while families gather here for the sunday brunch.
Walking by the Bombay store this seems to be one of the only open spots. The larger shops, american model, are all...
Around the corner of Bentley's I find an Internet Cafe where I can connect with my own computer. For the x-time in line, I try to contact Barefoot College, without result. After 10 minutes, a speaker tells me in broken english to contact Bunker Roy and gives me his direct number. Great! He's got my mail, and there will be someone to help me when I arrive in Ajmer. I can stay at Tilonia, in the Barefoot Guest House, and he assures me that there will be enough people to help me with translation. He doesn't want to be interviewed: it's all done by the people at Tilonia, and I have to talk with them.
In Bombay it's becoming hotter by the day.
At the corner of Henry street, I witness a peculiar...
Today is Maharaj' birthday and I promised Radha to put some flowers on his samadi. It's close to Banganga Tank, at Walkeshwar Mandir, in the neighborhood of Malabar Hills. I make it a full day out and will walk most of the traject, crossing Bombay.
Woken up by my alarm at 08.45am, did not have enough sleep. Got up quickly because I want to check at Bentley's Hotel for a cheaper room. Insisted with the managers - normally it was all full booked till january 10th.
India is the country of the NO, says Suketu Mehta, and he's damn right: that NO is your test and you have to insist to get past it. Finally some people checked out and I could visit the room: facing Colaba Causeway with a double window, it's a very very noisy room but also very spacious, normally for 3 people. I decide to take the room (1220 Rs). It has a work-table and I can make sound recordings from the traffic -Horn Please!- and try out some specific settings with my camera.
When...
I have to arrange my trainticket to Tilonia. After several attempts i finally reached someone at Barefoot. Vasu is sick and is in Jaipur. Dr. RamKaram (the administrator) is my new contact.
It becomes a real difficult task to arrange a ticket via the people from Harbour View. I think they have a percentage on the bus tickets, they absolutely want to sell me a ticket to Udaipur. After half a day they tell me that the bus is full and that i better arrange the ticket myself.
At Churchgate station I get a reservation -by wonder- in no time. Long distance reservations: a destinated office and very good service from Indian Railways. I 'll leave Bombay the 7th at 9pm. Take a direct train to Ajmer,...
cities are the gateways to dreams and devils :: the acclimatisation station [quote by Suketu Mehta]
- moist smells
- perfumes of jasmine and pepper
- stinking garbage
- black and yellow cabs
- slums and stray dogs
- complete traffic chaos
- new year, radio club - people - bars
- booking misunderstandings
- tips, tips, tips
- betel stains on the sidewalk
- beggars
- horn battles
- too many busses and taxis
- wide avenues
- victorian buildings
- hindus and muslims
- bright colored sarees
- dark faces
- yes, madame - yes, madame!
- coconut and sugercane juice
-...
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Preparation of the Making Off Stand-Alone Nodes in Meshed networks
Scenario 1: Stand alone PhotoVoltaic-system
Step by Step description by Bartaku.
Date: 2007 12 22.
Vernacular Observation:
Setting up the system coincided with the moment the plants start growing
towards the sun again... winter solstice!
Set up location:
OKNO rooftop, center of brussels (50°50'13" North, 4°22'3")
Set up time: from 11am to 5pm, with numerous interuptions
(normally feasible with 3 persons in 2hrs max).
Some musings of Villém Flusser on the freedom of the migrant and new ways of building houses:
Flusser's ideas about communication and identity have their roots in the concept of recognizing the other through self-determination and self-realization.
Becoming human is achieved through being thrown in an abyss of absurdity an then turning this devastating and painful experience into the liberating task of creating meaning by consciously connecting with self-chosen partners.
Architects must stop thinking geographically and begin to conceptualize topologically.
A house should be conceived of no longer as an artificial cave but rather as a bending in the field of interpersonal relations. A creative ...
Het concept van zelforganisatie sluit aan op mijn ruimer onderzoek naar de verschillende vormen en gedragingen van 'taal' en de artistieke implementatie daarvan in audio-visuele werken.
Daar waar mijn werk van de laatste jaren echter een nadruk legde op een subversief en artistiek onderzoek van bestaande technologie (spraaktechnologie, mesh-networks, sensornetwerken), staat de technologie die in dit project aan bod komt ten dienste van een groter sociaal geheel.
Via alternatieve technologieën als zonne energie en wireless communicatie networks worden nieuwe jobs en nieuwe verantwoordelijkheden geschapen, er wordt een duurzame verandering nagestreefd voor mens en milieu.
Als auteur/kunstenaar ...
De experimentele documentaire wil vanuit subjectief standpunt de relaties en processen binnen de Mahili Samiti groepen tonen. In deze zelforganiserende structuren, die women empowerment tot doel hebben, is elke vrouw op beurt leraar en leerling. Het project is een initiatief van het Barefoot College in Rajasthan, en heeft zich over 35 jaar tijd als een organisch netwerk over India verspreid.
Naast een sociaal, politiek en ecologisch bewustmaken, bieden de ‘awareness workshops’, georganiseerd door en voor ongeletterde Hindi vrouwen, hands-on opleidingen aan. Deze nieuwe kansen geven de vrouwen een onafhankelijker positie en respect binnen hun gemeenschap.
April 2007 tijdens het Luminous Green Symposium georganiseerd door de vzw Foam ontmoette ik Mr. Srinivasan Soundara Rajan, in de omgang Mr. Vasu genoemd. Hij is een van de initiatiefnemers en bezielers van het Barefoot College in Tilonia, Rajasthan, India. Ik was ten zeerste onder de indruk van zijn project, dat enkele van de 'pijnpunten' uit de Indische maatschappij op een totaal experimentele en eigen open manier aanpakt.
Het Barefoot College, opgericht in 1972, is een erkende vrijwilligersorganisatie die, samen met de beoogde doelgroepen, werkt aan de basisnoden van gemarginaliseerde rurale en/of economische gemeenschappen in India, en die een duurzame verandering in het dagelijkse leven...
A roof terras which we want to transform in an electronic and techno-ecological garden. A project for the year 2008.
With the eco-garden project we want to blend the real and the digital in one and the same nature. We will explore how this fusion takes place: examine in a digital way the growth, blossoming and decay of plants while they are submitted to the natural elements as wind, rain, snow, etc.
How can this evolution be generated, controlled, enhanced or imagined in artworks? Is our environment programmable? How does the fusion of natural and artificial matter produce new organisms, new environments, new natures? How does technology animate nature and space,...
annemie_maes, media artist and activist, holds a masters degree in fine arts and cultural studies. She is founder of so-on, a group of artists working with image, sound and technology. In their artprojects they research the transversal field of installations, performances and audio-visual compositions. Most of the projects are linked to the problematization of new art in the public space, from a socio-cultural background. The focus is to identify innovation and change while developing artistic projects, and research new aesthetical presentation techniques. Annemie Maes is co-founder of
Anne Marie Maes (BE) is an artist and researcher with an extensive track record in socially engaged art projects that strive for greater awareness about the fragility of our natural environment and for the adoption of strategies to mitigate the effects of climate change. She has worked extensively with communities on urban agriculture, the creation of connected urban green corridors and the installation and monitoring of innovative beehives. This translated into documentaries, participatory art works and installations. In parallel, Anne Marie Maes has been exploring the living world for creating a new aesthetic and novel materials such as fabrics based on bacteria, algae and plants. This has...
EXHIBITIONS
Curriculum Vitae AnneMarie Maes (english, selection)
2024
Cyfest#15 Vulnerability, Venice Biennale, (It)
Pollinations, Castellum, Utrecht (Nl)
2023
Science on the Edge of Chaos, Albertina, Brussels (Be)
Garden of Knowledge, BULDNIS, MuZee Ostend (Be)
Renaissance sauvage : la perspective symbiotique, Jousse Entreprise Paris (Fr)
Matter of Kinship, Casa de Mateus (Pt)
Second Nature, 10N Gallery Menorca (Es)
Festival International de L’Histoire de L’Art, Chateau de Fontainebleau (Fr)
Mateus Labs, Fondacion Mateus Vila Real, Portugal (solo)
ISEA23, group show Paris
A Horse With No Name, Gallery show, Ost...
AnneMarie Maes (or Annemie Maes) - Brussels, 1955 studied a masters in fine arts at the Sint-Lucas Academy of Fine Arts in Brussels, a masters of cultural studies at the University of Brussels, and a specialisation in anthropological documentary film at the Institute for Sound Image Culture in Brussels.
In 2004 AnneMarie 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 [BUBL] as a spin-off from OKNO. It focuses on urban bee colonies as a vehicle for novel artistic practices to raise...
Annemie Maes, short bio
Annemie Maes, media artist and activist, holds master degrees 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 women empowerment. Most of the projects are linked to the problematization of new art in public space, from a socio-cultural background.
Annemie Maes is co-founder of Okno, an artist-run organisation working with media art and ecology. Her recent research work focuses on Connected OpenGreens : a transdisciplinary project at the intersection of art, biology and green technology, including artistic research on topics...
1. women empowerment : trajectories of change.
Rural India today : What makes change happen in women’s lives?
How are women from different social categories trying to reposition themselves in public and domestic spheres to change attitudes, achieve recognition and exercise their rights at home and at work? Which forms of recognition can best support w...
Wired Cities is a project on non-linear storytelling, exploring the city as a balanced and tactile ecological system.
The map of the city is erased and reconstructed from scratch.
How do artists experience a specific city? Edifices, old and new, that are considered landmarks can be reconstructed and arranged along one’s architectural fantasies. Old and new stories weave maps of collective memories. Analog and digital input are mixed. New skylines emerge out of folding architecture. Photographs and movies become new textures.
Soundscapes and bits of spoken word and written text complete t...
With the urban garden project we want to blend the natural and the digital world in one and the same eco-system. We will explore how this fusion takes place: investigate in a digital way the growth, blossoming and decay of plants while they are submitted to the natural elements as wind, rain, snow, etc.
Can this evolution be generated, controlled, enhanced or imagined in artworks? Is our environment programmable? How does the fusion of natural and artificial matter produce new organisms, new environments, new natures? How does technology animate nature and space, and how do users...
Rural India today : What makes change happen in women’s lives?
How are women from different social categories trying to reposition themselves in public and domestic spheres to change attitudes, achieve recognition and exercise their rights at home and at work? Which forms of recognition can best support women’s work as a tool for empowerment?
How do women workers organize to claim rights and recognition?
We want to research the elements that provoke these changes. Trace the opportunities created by an original vision and leading to innovative practices. Study the actions of mob...
le potager des fraternités ouvrières
Elk eerste weekend van de maand organiseert Gilbert een open workshop in ecologisch tuinieren voor geïnteresseerden uit Wallonië, Vlaanderen en Frankrijk. In zijn labo, volgestouwd met doosjes biologische zaden, wisselen participanten weetjes uit over het wel en wee van hun tuin, fruit en groenten.
Zondag 4 november ging ik op uitnodiging van Kobe Matthys een kijkje nemen in Gilberts' eco-tuin in Moeskroen. (zie fotoos)
Hieronder enkele tuintips voor de tijd van het jaar: de aankomende winter.
Vóór de winter te planten: ajuin, look, sjalot.
Oogsten: verse ajuintjes eind maart, grote ajuinen in augustus.
De lookbollen die ik bij Gilbert kocht...
Sounds of the Djna El Fna square and the Marrakech souk.
Best listen with binaural headphones.
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"... as I see it, poetry is not prose simply because poetry is in one way or another formalized. It is not poetry by reason of its content or ambiguity but by reason of its allowing musical elements [time, sound] to be introduced into the world of words."
John Cage
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notovo phase#2
As a generative sound installation No2Pho plays with a connected set of elements. It is composed of dissonant synthetic voices, changing in real time from speech to sound.
more...
What is RC
http://reseaucitoyen.be/
http://boum.no-ip.com/gmap/gmap.php
Reseau Citoyen is a Brussels project for a user-run wireless network via wi-fi. RC has an ideological approach in putting up a free and open network and is run on a voluntary basis.
The volunteers/developers provide the technological expertise and in a collaborative spirit make it available to the inhabitants of Brussels.
RC was initiated in 2000 by Yvan Markoff, Jean-Charles de Longueville (less active now in RC due to a law case) and Marie Anne; and was setup to develop a longterm cooperation/communication project for Africa (called bombolong).
At that time, mesh networking was relatively new.
A Meshnetwork
Mesh networking is a way to route data, voice and instructions between nodes. It allows for continuous connections and reconfiguration around broken or blocked paths by 'hopping' from node to node until the destination is reached.
Mesh networks differ from other networks in that the component parts can all connect to each other via multiple hops, and they generally are not mobile. Mesh networks can be seen as one type of ad hoc network.
Mesh networks are self-healing: the network can still operate even when a node breaks down or a connection goes bad. As a result, a very reliable network is formed.
(decentralised: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mesh_network)
You define yourself as a digital materialist. Can you explain what you mean by this, and what is your artistic background.
Digital materialism is the fundamental concept for my audio-visual work: installations and performances. I see the digital computer not as a tool, but as a raw material for generating artworks, similar to stone, wood, iron and so on.
In a digital computer you have huge clusters of numbers, such as files and data. These numbers have no forms, and in order to perceptualize them we need to transform the numbers into sound, images, text, and so on. The important point is how to perceptualize the numbers inside the computer, how we transform them into their perceptual form. That is the basic approach for creating art.
People often say it is very important how to digitize something, but i think the most important point is how to perceptualize the digital itself. The raw material is only numbers, without any form, and the way we transform this raw materials into a perceptual form is the basic approach of my digital work.
Do you mean by this that an artist should see from start beyond the numbers a certain form of audio and visuals?
What is the starting point? The starting point are the numbers, not the physical world. Starting from the digital domain is the most important approach for the digital materialist. These numbers are some kind of conceptual material and than they transform into a concrete form.
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digital dada from buda(pest)
The Re:activism conference addresses what role social activism can play in the broad process in which emerging new media technologies transform existing structures of cultural, economic and political power.
The Sonic Tags project is to build small FM-transmitters and place a bunch of them in the public city-space. Supplied with a street-map, a small radio-receiver and headphones, the public can discover a city-center tagged with sound-messages, sometimes poetic, sometimes activist, sometimes just informative.
The skinhead had no face, he was all head. He took me to the ocean somewhere in Belgium where we roamed the dilapidated bunkers. Thick concrete slabs, although fallen, had created a geometrically imprecise organism of their own. We crawled between the empty spaces created by the fallen concrete. We made a campfire and smoked Moroccan hash while my skinhead told World War II stories. That night the skinhead and I went for a walk on the beach. He told me about the white supremacist conferences he would travel to in the south of France and Switzerland. He told me that European countries were too small to handle immigrants, and that he was fighting for the renewed prowess of his country. He said ...