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.

‘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.

Glass House for an urban bee colony. A work in progress ...

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.

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...

'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.

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...

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...

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.

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;

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.

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.

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...

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.

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.

'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.

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...

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.

‘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 ...

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...

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.

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...

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,...

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...

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...

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...

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 ...

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,...

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...

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.

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 ...

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 ...

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...

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,...

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...

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 ...

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...

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...

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.

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...

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...

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...

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. If...

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...

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.

This Portfolio gives an overview of my work from 1997 to 2009. Texts and higher resolution images on demand.

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...

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...

#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...

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'.

"... 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.)

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....