When I was a little boy (oh yes, I love stories that begin this way too) there were many things I wanted to be when I grew up. Two of these were astronaut and apiarist (I can remember the second quite well because my mother thought I said atheist…but that’s another story.) When I was a boy that was a bit older than I was when I was little, I would sit and program in basic on my trs-80. I would create my own text based adventures – little worlds of my own that could be explored and visited by the people who hung out at the local Tandy shop. When I started university I became obsessed with virtual worlds and artificial life forms, virtual reality was a buzz word of the moment, but all I had to work with was infini-D, a video camera, hypercard and my imagination – I still remember some of the works I made during that time with fondness – may favourite from this period was a faux museum exhibition that explored the culture of a race of sentient beings discovered on the ROM of a Commodore_64, the whole thing being powered by a (not so faux) Tesla Coil. (That reminds me…to do list: look through that old pile of vhs documentation.)

My practice has trod many interesting paths since then – my research has weaved its way through, and in many ways weaved itself from, a diverse range of cultural and theoretical interests. Mellifera in particular and muve environments in general have begun to make it possible to realise many idea and bring together ideas and concepts that previously lay unresolved, as notes or drawings in my notebooks or marginal texts in my reading matter.

Though I may never become the apiarist of my childhood dreams, I think it is true to say that I may become the apiarist that my cyberspace obsessed self of the early nineties would have wanted me to become. A central unifying thread throughout my practice and theoretical inquiry of the last years, has been one of exploring and searching for a potential site of the self – or perhaps to dare wonder if this site exists at all. So in observing and studying the honey bee, and in asking what such a creature would be like if it were native to a muve environment, and creating a world for it to live in and a narrative construct surrounding it, I am also extending an ongoing investigation into the self as a potential construction of narrative.

My interests, in the case of Mellifera, are also nicely counterbalanced with those of Trish, and as we continue with our collaboration, I am certain that new, exciting and as yet unthought-of ideas and obsessions will develop for both of us. And who knows, I may yet get to be that astronaut … Though they may not realise it, I am sure the new colonies on mars will be in need of a virtual apiarist …

Andrew Burrell, July, 2008

The shift from culturing my own stem cells in the laboratory to observing bees at the ‘bee-house’, Queensland Brain Institute (QBI) might, initially, seem like quite an arbitrary one. Certainly my knowledge about bee behaviours when I began my residency with the Visual and Sensory Neuroscience group at QBI was pretty average – social communities; queens, drones & workers; swarming and painful stings probably about summed it up! In fact the open-ended methodologies that characterise my art/science practice have fostered the evolution of organic, relational networks with many points of entry. So, from this perspective, honey bee research offered an exciting opportunity to develop a number of disparate topics related to my art practice.

In the biomedical sciences I had the opportunity to observe cellular life at a molecular level. I developed a growing interest in living systems and the respective functions of “brain” and “mind”. As my focus on these areas increased I began looking for a possible collaborator at QBI and I became acquainted with Professor Srinivasan and his research into perception and navigation in the honey bee. I was particularly drawn to his investigations into the cognitive capacities of the honey bees’ small brain which have shown that, amongst other things, an understanding of visual processing in insects may provide simple, novel solutions to problems in machine vision, artificial intelligence and robotics. I felt that there was a definite connection between this research and my on-going interest in the developing role of technologies both in the scientific laboratory and in the various ways they empower viewer/participant interactivity in artworks. Through a series of artworks, beginning with one of my earliest interactive installations: ‘Temporal Intervals’, I investigated the role of the Internet in both real-time and virtual interactivity and the disparity between ephemeral data and analogue processes. Fragile traces left by virtual viewers in the real-time gallery space can create a complex interplay between participants, machines and locations – merging and rupturing identities, data and spaces.

More recently, the advent of programmes such as Second Life offer other ways to explore system-environment constructs in burgeoning, widespread communities. Significantly for our MMUVE_IT project, these virtual participatory tropes can be extended and modified to incorporate real-time locations and participants. In this context models from the natural world are of particular interest – for example: cardiac cells are programmed to seek each other out, cluster and synchronise their beating; whilst individual honey bees must function as a unified community in order to survive. The MMUVE_IT project will explore the artistic possibilities presented by Professor Srinivasan’s Visual and Sensory Neuroscience honey bee research. The scientific data combined with our in-depth observations of honey bee experiments at QBI will be reinterpreted from an artistic perspective. The aim is to develop a human/computer interface system in both on-line and real-time participatory environments that reference the sophisticated communication systems and behaviours of honey bee communities.

Trish Adams, July 2008.

A short list of texts exploring some diverse aspects of bees – the cognitive, sensory and communicative habits of which will be playing a central role in our developing project. (not including texts and publications from the Visual & Sensory Neuroscience Group, which will form a separate list.)

Gould, James L. & Gould, Carol G. The Animal Mind, Scientific American Library, N.Y. 1994

Gould, James L. & Gould, Carol G. The Honey Bee, Scientific American Library, N.Y. 1988

Honey Bee Facts Page;
http://www.ivyhall.district96.k12.il.us/4th/kkhp/1insects/honbeefax.html

Odrowaz-Sypniewska, Margaret, Bee Lore,
http://www.angelfire.com/mi4/polcrt/Bee.html

Beuys, Joseph, Honey Pump in the Workplace, Documenta 6, Kassel:
http://www.slought.org/img/archive1/1258+press1.jpg

Gare, Shelley. The Sting, The Weekend Australian Magazine, September 15-16, 2007, pp14-18

Pundyk, Grace, The Honey Spinner, Murdoch Books, Sydney, 2008

Klein, B.A. Insects & Humans: a relationship recorded in visual art in Encyclopedia of Human-Animal Relationships, Bekoff, M. ed. Greenwood, New Hampshire, 2007

Bee Strategy Helps Servers Run More Sweetly,
http://www.gatech.edu/news-room/release.php?id=1605