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.

Monday 11 December 2017 at ESA-StLuc – 18H30 > 20H30
Lieu partenaire : ESA Saint-Luc (Aud IV) – 30, place Morichar, 1060 – Bruxelles
With: Sophie-Charlotte Thieroff (Akademie Solitude), Christiana Kazakou (The Scientist in residence program), Alain Liedts (Fondation Liedts-Meesen), Elisabetta Lazzaro (HKU University of the Arts Utrecht), AnneMarie Maes (artist).

AnneMarie Maes will present the Intelligent Guerilla Beehive project.
Her work 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.

I am an artist and a beekeeper. In my Urban Bee Lab I examine the behaviour of honeybee colonies in relation to the environment.
Their daily actions are at the center of my artistic research and a source of inspiration for my artworks.
In previous projects I studied the development of a honeybee colony through its own sound. The buzz of a colony and its behaviour and conditions are quite related.
Through patterns discovered in the collected audio, video and sensor data, I analyzed the characteristics of the colony and the relationship with its environment.
The data were processed using sophisticated pattern recognition, AI technologies, and graphics software.

The Intelligent Guerilla Beehive is a biotech project. It is the third generation in my series of observation devices. This refuge for swarming honeybees is a mobile -double- sensing device.
It is mirroring the health status of the environment and that of the bees living inside the hive. Colonies of color-changing bacteria, living on the outer skin of the hive, send out warnings at high environmental pollution. The inner skin is a host for colonies of pro-biotic bacteria that support a healthy bee microbiome.
Biomimesis is used as inspiration for the development of the new hive. 
Palynology -the study of pollen grains- offers a good starting point for the research. The pollen’ qualities are being examined in terms of usefulness for sensing environmental threaths and foir their adaptive and defensive qualities on micro- and nano-scale.

The next step in the R&D was to implement these biotechnological qualities in the primary materials that are used to build the beehive.
I decided to focus on a few organic materials that are largely available on earth: cellulose and chitosan.
I started a series of experiments to grow cellulose-based biofabrics with micro-organisms.
In collaboration with scientists I decided to augment these cellulose skins with living monitoring technology in the form of bacterial biofilms.
In the hacklab I implemented the bacterial biofilms on the leathery cellulose skin of the beehive. These bacteria are designed to sense environmental pollution and they will change color when they discover a specific pollutant in the air.

The pollution particles are transmitted by the bees themselves when they land upon the skin of the Intelligent Beehive. Fine dust sticking to the hairs on the bees’ body is passed on to the bacteria living in the biofilm on the outer skin of the hive. The bacteria are modified and they provoke a color pattern on the skin.
The ongoing development of these bacterial colonies on the cellulose skin forms a crust that crumbles under ever new layers of bacteria.
This makes that the Intelligent Beehive’s outer membrane becomes protected by a layer of living cells that constantly feed off the dead ones and thus cleans and repairs itself.

Next step (spring 2018) is testing the Intelligent Beehive with a real bee colony inside. In the meantime, I expose my sculptures that express the concept of the Intelligent Guerilla Beehive to raise awareness about the cause of the disappearing bees.