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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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Issue No.3, March 2010 SECOND NATURE

S E C O N D N AT U R E Issue No.3, March 2010

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