Beekeeper was an installation created in collaboration with Lita Albuquerque and Jon Beasley for a show titled “AOR” at the Frederick Weisman Museum at Pepperdine University. Lita envisioned the entire show operating as a single work concerned with the connection between the Earth and the cosmos and the transmutability of being. She often draws on themes from Mediterranean and Native American astronomy, the use of the stars by early navigators, and the investigations of physics and string theory; and through her research discovered that the bee has a long symbolic history in Egypt as a carrier of light and interchangeable with the stars. With that in mind, she envisioned the figure of a beekeeper slowly dissolving into the space around him. Slowly particles of the figure break off and begin moving out away from the figure, as time passes the pull increases and more and more particles break away until all that is left is slowly moving field of particles on black. Eventually the pull reverses, and the particles begin to move back to their original position only to start the process over again. The beekeeper becomes a swarm of bee/particles which in turn become a starry sky.
Two versions of the piece were made, each of a different initial figure of the beekeeper, and in the final installation each was projected on a different wall of a large room. These pieces were thematically paired with a short video “Starkeeper” which featured the figure of a astronaut being slowly concealed by fog which later dissolves to reveal a star-filled sky.
The software for Beekeeper started off simple enough. First the figure is extracted from the background and each pixel is made into a particle, which is then takes off in a random direction. But after working with Jon and Lita and discussing the behavior of the particles if became clear that something else was needed; and I became convinced that the conceptual elements of the piece should extend all the way to the code itself such that the execution of the code was, in a sense, the execution of what the code was portraying. Here are some diagrams which appeared in the catalogue:
I also wrote a short essay for the AOR catalogue where I discuss how the code works and the code’s relationship to the conceptual underpinnings of the piece.
