These works are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
SIGNS OF LIFE - cohabitations
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.
ECOLOGICAL FUTURES: Sensorial Sponge
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).
TERRITORY#1, assemblage bacterial grown materials
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)
SHARED GARDENS: a proposition
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.
SLOW METABOLISM and other objects
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.
INTELLIGENT BEEHIVE 2.0 - sculpture with video
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...
L'ORIGINE DU MONDE, installation
L’origine du monde is an artistic representation of my research into the possibilities of cyanobacteria and (micro) algae as source for renewable energy and novel biodegradable materials.
The installation shows a strongly enlarged bacterial chain made from glass cells. Every cell is filled with cyanobacteria producing realtime photosynthesis.
ALIEN INTELLIGENCE II, lightboxes
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).
Large scale SCANNING ELECTRON MICROGRAPHS
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.
DISRUPTED SENSATIONS - small lightboxes
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...
scale models IGB
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.UNTITLED (green and orange wall textile)
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.
the INTELLIGENT GUERRILLA BEEHIVE 2.0 (algae power)
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.
ELBBIENEN - Intelligent Guerrilla Beehive, Sculpture in Public Space
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 ...
UNTITLED (Yellow - a tribute to Eva Hesse)
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.
ALCHIMIA NOVA - video
The video, filmed in the studio and open air laboratory of AnneMarie Maes, gives an overview of the different elements of the Sensorial Skin-research.
GLOSSA and STIMULI - b/w micrographs lightboxes
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.
TABLE with SKINS - sculpture
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.
VISIBLE, INVISIBLE - textile works
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.
BACTERIAL MANTAREY - organic sculpture
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 INTELLIGENT GUERILLA BEEHIVE / part II
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...
GENESIS of a MICROBIAL SKIN
'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.
VARIATION GAMES (video)
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.
THE LABORATORY FOR FORM AND MATTER
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.
BEE AGENCY (scanning electron micrographs)
‘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.
INTELLIGENT GUERRILLA BEEHIVE & OTHER WORKS
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.
PH3 - FUTURE ARCHAEOLOGY
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...
ALIEN INTELLIGENCE
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
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.
LIQUID BLOCKHEAD
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.
COLLECTION, ACCROCHAGE
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 INTELLIGENT GUERILLA BEEHIVE / part I
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.
BLACK CIRCLE, WHITE CIRCLE, ORIGINAL SKIN
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 II
'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 AMBITION OF THE TERRITORY
'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
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...
TBH_3-CHANNEL VIDEO INSTALLATION
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.
FLAGS, GRIDS, BANNERS and COLLAGES
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...
BEES AS ARCHITECTS
‘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 ...
INVISIBLE GARDEN - lightboxes
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...
MOEBIUS, sculpture
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.
INFRARED OBSERVATION MOVIES
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...
INTELLIGENT BEEHIVE - SMARTSKIN DESIGN
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,...
SCAFFOLDED SOUND BEEHIVE
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...
GUERILLA BEEHIVES STUDY
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
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...
SOUND BEES anywhere & everywhere - 8 channel soundpiece
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 ...
SEM PHOTOGRAPHS [lightboxes]
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,...
INVISIBLE GARDEN
the Green Light District : the place of Nature in...
The Invisible Garden / l'Orto Invisibile. Naturalistic Observations and Hidden Memories. is a large-scale art installation in the exhibition PORTFOLIO OLDER WORK
This Portfolio gives an overview of my work from 1997 to 2009.
Texts and higher resolution images on demand.
NOTOVO - NO2PHO
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...
MAHILA/WOMEN - short film
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...
POLITICS OF CHANGE - publication
#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...
PEOPLE DATABASE - online database project
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'.
CLOSED CIRCUIT#3
"... 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
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....