Apian

After our selection for Phase I of Eyebeam’s Rapid Reponse for a Better Digital Future, Apian is proud to announce that we have been selected for the second phase of the programme.

From November 2020 to February 2021, Apian will develop a prototype for The Intimacy Machine in collaboration with Studio Harris Blondman and the visual anthropologist Ellen Lapper.

Started via a residency at La Becque (Switzerland), The Intimacy Machine began as an idea: to build an alternative beehive for the future. Throughout Phase I of Eyebeam Rapid Reponse fellowship, we have developed and given form to this project by conducting interviews as part of the long-term ethnographic research that informs it. The project’s goal is to create a polymorphous machine that twists contemporary, profit-driven, digital surveillance tools in beekeeping in order to develop a site where we can encounter bees on a more egalitarian basis. Beekeeping technologies generate data. By archiving these data, the site becomes a platform for learning about and with bees, in order to re-create and create new refugia. As a result, profit-driven technologies are turned upside down; rather than monitoring bees for colony management, they are used to compose a new type of relationship – an intimate one, yet without proximity (Metcalf 2008). Intimacy is created by way of the data’s aesthetic, and each entry is supplemented with information about its original source, bridging the gap between science and art.

To learn more about Eyebeam and Rapid Response fellowship please find the following link: www.eyebeam.org/​rapid-response-phase-2/