/mellifera

Mellifera: a mixed reality project 2009-10

complex artificial life system with unique artistic and conceptual goals.

In the following text the collaborators describe the concepts and stages behind their individual journeys during the mellifera collaboration.

Andrew begins by describing why working not only in virtual environments, but on this very project was inevitable — at least with the benefit of hindsight:

When I was a little boy there were many things I wanted to be when I grew up. Two of these were astronaut and apiarist. At this time, I would sit and program on my Dick Smith System-80, creating 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.

Dr. Trish Adams & Dr. Andrew Burrell

Much later, in the early 1990s to be precise, I became obsessed with virtual worlds and artificial life forms. Virtual reality was a buzzword of the moment, but all I had to work with was Infini-D, a video camera, Hypercard and my imagination - my favourite artwork 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.

mellifera is an on-line interactive environment in Second Life which is linked to a series of real-time exhibitions in gallery and museum spaces.

Central to this innovative, ecologically-sensitive artwork is the artists’ direct engagement with various aspects of bee behaviour at Queensland Brain Institute, where researchers are investigating cognition, navigation and communication in the honey bee. The artists’ poetic and scientific interactions with the bees inspired the development of mellifera’s experimental human/computer interfaces that provide new modes of sensory experience for both virtual & real-world participants.

My practice has trod many interesting and forking paths since then — mellifera, in particular, and multi-user virtual worlds in general have begun to make it possible to realise many ideas and concepts that previously lay unresolved, as notes and drawings in my notebooks. 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.

mellifera is a collaborative project between Trish Adams and Andrew Burrell who developed interactive devices that created dynamic connections between the physical world and mellifera’s virtual environment – a

For Trish, the journey towards technology has been more recent than Andrew, but it builds on a long-standing engagement with analogue interactivity and the links between machines and the human being:

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I am an artist who has moved from artforms such as sculpture and drawing to a practice that incorporates interactivity and media technologies. My focus throughout has been an interest in aspects of corporeality and methodologies that enable viewer interaction. This has involved various scientific collaborations, including working with my own stem cells and being artist in residence at the Queensland Brain Institute’s “All Weather Bee Facility”. I have had opportunities to observe cellular life at a molecular level and the cognitive capacities of the honey bees’ small brain – fostering a growing interest in living systems and the respective functions of “brain” and “mind”. My practice can be characterised by its open-ended methodologies, leading to 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 on-going interests..

Through a series of artworks, I have investigated interactivity and the Internet; exploring the disparity between ephemeral data and analogue processes. Fragile traces left by virtual viewers in a real-time gallery space can create a complex interplay between participants, machines and locations — merging and rupturing identities, data and spaces.

Virtual environments such as Second Life offer other ways to explore system-environment constructs in burgeoning communities.

Significantly for our mellifera 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, individual honey bees must function as a unified community in order to survive. This influenced our decision to develop a human/ computer interface and complex virtual system that reference the sophisticated communication systems and behaviours of honey bee communities.

Trish and Andrew come to a place of shared interest from very different directions — a divergent approach that they believe is responsible

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for a strong collaborative effort. The nature of this collaboration was a complex one. The artists incorporated discussion at each stage of the project, either face to face or in Second Life — each change and stage in the work’s development was the outcome of debate and mutual agreement. Significantly, Second Life became not only the media in which Trish and Andrew created the project, but also their central collaborative meeting place — uniting Trish in Brisbane with Andrew in Sydney via their avatars.

It is interesting to note that while Andrew had been exploring the possibilities of virtual worlds for some time, this was a relatively new platform for Trish.

Possibilities for sophisticated participatory configurations in interactive installations are, however, at the core of both of their interests in the Second Life platform. Trish explains:

When Andrew introduced me to Second Life at the beginning of our project I had very little idea what to expect but I regarded it as another way of exploring the “self ” as an entity that is not bounded by physicality. I was interested in the way that an individual performing an action mediated by communication technologies, such as the Internet, could have an effect in another (real or virtual) place. I had been experimenting with physical and virtual presence in the interactive artworks, Temporal Intervals and Wave Writer, so, for me, Second Life was somewhere to go and try out new levels of “being”.

Having said this I have to acknowledge that I am less adventurous than I might be in this virtual environment. I have a deep need for the “home base” that the terra.mellifera environment gives me. I do not roam far and wide across Second Life unless in the company of Nonnatus aka Andrew. Whilst totally intellectually aware that my avatar is, to quote Andrew: ‘only digital’; my senses tell me otherwise and I hate to be bumped and jostled by other avatars! In a way my familiar “self ” is transported in spite of myself.

We have created a resident, independent agent in terra.mellifera called “Essential Beeswing”. Essential is non-gendered and

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referred to by the old English term: “ou”. Although, technically ou is a “bott”, the sophisticated behaviours that Andrew has assigned to ou, following our inworld discussions, have created a persona to whom visiting avatars relate. For my part, I look forward to the fact that Essential will be in terra.mellifera to greet me when I visit! We have had feedback from other visitors indicating that they have also become very attached to Essential.

This was not our creative focus; it has developed as a result of ou’s inworld persona.

In spite of my rather unadventurous behaviour in Second Life, I thoroughly enjoy visiting. It is fun! Sometime I have conversations with others from diverse backgrounds and countries. We all have an element of mystique; none of us are what we seem — even those who appear to have tried to model their inworld self on their RL appearance can never utterly succeed. We are moving in a fantasy of sorts but bringing with us, in my case anyway, our familiar concepts. This is a fascinating and fruitful area for further study.

As previously mentioned, Trish and Andrew have a shared interest in the self and its construction. In order to illuminate some of the underlying philosophical concerns in the mellifera project Andrew outlines some of his own concerns with the concept of the constructed self:

A central unifying thread through my practice over the last years has been one of exploring and searching for a site of “the self ”.

Sometimes I wonder if this site exists at all. It has been my longheld view that if there is a “thing” that defines a human individual as being more than the sum of their parts, then it is a sense of a personal narrative. This narrative is something that we strive to keep intact, and it is made up of the “stuff ” of our memories and imaginations. There are clear and documentable inconsistencies in our narratives – inconsistencies that, in the main, we can live with as long as we can create a general sense of stability within these narratives.

investigation, this view walks a precarious path searching for a balance between an ingrained, yet discredited, Cartesian model of the self as an “I” distinct from the body, and a biological reductionist view as argued (for example) by the biologist Richard Dawkins, philosopher Daniel C. Dennet and Cognitive and Artificial intelligence scientist, Marvin Minsky.

In considering some of the central ideas of this work, I ask: “are we but machines for replicating, following a set of pre-defined rules?” and the answer I keep returning to is: “perhaps, but this surely does not mean that any sense of wonder should be lost for, as you can see, the result of the operational processes of these machines still adds up to be much more than we could ever imagine from simply observing them in a neutral state”. From simplicity, complexity emerges.

So, for me, the process of creating mellifera has been one of constructing a complex whole from many, many simpler parts — parts that can, in this case, be reduced down to elements of code (and ultimately down to machine language and states of “off ” and “on”). It is a process of asking the question of how, if a code based life form is ever seen to be “alive”’ in the sense that we could scientifically measure, would this change our own sense of “self ”?

Ultimately, the whole process is about the system, as well as the individual creatures and lifeforms within it. A question that the artists have consistently asked throughout the whole process is: what makes any new addition to the system an integral and logical part of the system, continually adding complexity to the whole? Whilst they have carefully observed the bees at the Brain Institute, discussed their behaviours at length with the scientists there, and consulted relevant books and articles, they have always been aware that they were not trying to recreate a bee in the virtual world.

Rather, they were investigating what sort of qualities a creature might have that would allow it to exhibit aspects of “bee-ness” (whilst not being a bee) that would, in turn, add to the gestalt of the systems and poetics of the mellifera environment.

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The “bee hive controller” allows the virtual lifeforms to react to the audiences proximity to a physical representation of their home environment

Sonically vibrated metal bowls of water in the physical environment react to the “emotional state” of virtual mellifera lifeforms 302

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Light and reflection play an important part in the metaphoric and poetic representation of the data networks involved in the mellifera system Issue No.3, March 2010 SECOND NATURE

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A viewer is literally able to breath life into the virtual environment through the custom built “breath controller�

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Touch sensitive panels allow a user to control their view of the virtual environment.

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Audience members enveloped by the large scale projection of the virtual enviroment - the physical space and the virtual space merge into a single reality.

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terra.mellifera – the perpetual virtual environment in Second Life Issue No.3, March 2010 SECOND NATURE

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Essential Beeswing, the resident artificial agent of terra.mellifera beckons the virtual bees – a moment many audience members find moving as they find they are relating to essential on an emotion level..

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terra.mellifera – the perpetual virtual environment in Second Life

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Trish and Andrew have investigated the complexity that can be obtained through the combination of less complex elements. In terra.mellifera they have generated a balanced ecosystem that also accommodates visiting avatars and real-world participants. Through both metaphor and subjective intent, they have shed light upon a wide range of themes relating to self, narrative and corporeality — breaching the spatial, physical and systemic constraints associated with virtual platforms and embodiment.

Acknowledgements mellifera was realised through the support of the Australia Council for the Arts MMUVE_IT! Initiative. The aim of this Initiative was to support artists experimenting with virtual environments and innovative physical interfaces.

Online Media Dr Trish Adams: http://www.wavewriter.net Dr Andrew Burrell: http://miscellanea.com mellifera project: http://mellifera.cc YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/user/melliferaProject Second Life http://slurl.com/secondlife/Caerleon%20Isle/241/242/27 http://www.youtube.com/user/melliferaProject#p/a/u/1/0FmsF3j64

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Biographies Dr. Trish Adams currently a Postdoctoral Research Fellow, RMIT University School of Arts, Melbourne and a visiting artist at the Visual & Sensory Neuroscience Group, Queensland Brain Institute, The University of Queensland, Brisbane. She has worked at the art/science nexus for a number of years and her doctoral research project involved a cross-disciplinary collaboration with a biomedical scientist during which she explored the impact of experimental techniques in biomedical engineering on expressions of corporeality. Here, Trish personalised her engagement with the scientific data, and was arguably the first artists to take the unscreened source material for her experiments from her own body in the form of adult stem cells from her blood. Trish’s research poses questions about what it means to be human in the twenty-first century, and the ways in which our understanding of ourselves will be changed by contemporary biotechnical developments. Her ongoing interest in corporeality and constructs of the “self ” lead her to explore virtual “presence” in Second Life through the mellifera project. In addition to her artworks Trish has presented her research outcomes through publications and at conferences such as: New Constellations: Art, Science & Society, Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, 2006; Perth Digital Art & Culture Conference, 2007; ISEA2008 and Eye of the Storm, Tate Britain, 2009.

Dr. Andrew Burrell is a Sydney-based independent contemporary arts practitioner, with a strong history in real time 3d and interactive audio installation. He completed a PhD in Fine Arts by thesis at the University of Sydney in 2005. His research focused on philosophical and poetic connections between memory, the collected object and narrative. One of the defining aspects of his work is an investigation into the construction of self with regard to the interrelationship of personal identity with memory and imagination, and the way in which real time networked virtual spaces influence these interactions.

He is very interested in using the unique position and voice of the contemporary artists to traverse the boundaries of art, science, poetics and academic enquiry. Andrew exhibits both online and in physical gallery spaces, including the recent Doppelgänger exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery, Canberra Australia and ‘the ecology of self-replicating systems’ symposium and exhibition hosted and supported by Neutral Ground and Soil Digital Media , Regina Canada. He has recently been published in IEEE MultiMedia (AprilJune 2009) and in the anthology Tropes for the Past. Hayden White and the History / Literature Debate. Rodopi, 2006.

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