AnneMarie Maes was awarded an Honourable Mention at Ars Electronica 2017 for her ongoing research project The Intelligent Guerilla Beehive.

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 as the cumulative effects of different pollutants. In many industrialized nations bee colonies are now threatened. Pesticides and parasites are among the main factors, but equally worrisome is air pollution and the compromised state of the bees’ foraging fields.

The Intelligent Guerilla Beehive is a radically new beehive designed for urban environments, offering a shelter to swarming bee colonies, and thus supporting pollination by the bees and protecting the biodiversity of their foraging fields. It has also been a starting point for exploring possible futures through artistic research on materials science and biotechnology. Navigating between a blueprint and a proof of concept, the Intelligent Guerilla Beehive is an artifact for the future, a fragment of a world to come. It tackles a new challenging application domain where a collaboration between human and non-human actors is necessary to maintain the resilience of the system.

Find more information about and images of the project on AnneMarie’s website here.