Eva Menger, freelance copywriter and MA Contemporary Literature & Culture student at Birkbeck, reports on Bee Composed Live, an immersive art and sound project featured in Arts Week 2018. 

When a bee flies into your piano, there are a couple of things you can do. You can choose to ignore it, get a bit annoyed, or carefully listen to the sound it produces and simply let it amaze you. Lily Hunter Green, contemporary sound artist, composer and current artist-in-residence at Birkbeck, opted for the latter. Starting in 2014 with ‘Bee Composed’, a project that involved transforming old pianos into beehives, she is now working towards ‘Bee Composed Live’, a live performance in which contemporary dancers, music and audiovisual compositions will function as an immersive and collaborative representation of the hive mind. As part of Birkbeck Arts Week, she shares her fascinations, findings and future aspirations.

Still of video projecting the collective consciousness of bees.

Bees are extraordinary. The way in which they work is astonishingly efficient and surprisingly relatable to our own neatly organised society. What makes them unique, however, is their ability to work as a collective consciousness. Despite having their own job roles – from bouncer bees to cleaner bees and architect bees – they are not autonomous and only work as part of something bigger, a phenomenon Hunter Green suitably calls ‘the hive mind’. Sharing life footage of this process, Hunter Green shows how it promotes togetherness – a strategy she doesn’t only applaud but tries to apply to her own way of working as well. Collaborating with people from all over the world, including molecular biologists, choreographers and computer scientists, she aims to educate on the science of the hive as well as the reasons why more and more bees are dying.

Having said that, she doesn’t want people to leave her performance feeling hopeless. Narratives around pesticides, climate change and modern farming are to be taken seriously, but hopelessness can lead to inaction – and that’s where Hunter Green wants to make a change. Unlike the 1950s science fiction trend of giant insects ruining everyday life, Hunter Green is keen to show how insects are something to be inspired by. Creating an understanding of their vital role in life through art will hopefully make people see that planting bee-friendly flowers in their gardens will already make a significant difference, she explains.

A piano-turned-into-beehive.

Turning bee science into a life composition seems appropriate both due to its resemblance to Greek tragedies (if there is more than one queen bee around, a violent battle awaits) and geographical nature. As just one of several dances bees perform to communicate with each other, the waggle dance serves to navigate the way to newly discovered food sources (fun fact: the better the food, the more excited the dance). The image below shows one of the contemporary dancers Hunter Green collaborated to visualise this process.

In addition to this dance, ‘Bee Composed Live’ includes visual recordings from the piano hive and original new compositions, ultimately intending to create a simulation of the hive mind. With issues as complex as bee extinction, immersive visualizations can help to create a public understanding. Learn more about Lily Hunter Green and her meaningful work, here.