Jan Mun (www.janmun.com) has an MFA from Rhode Island School of Design and has been working with living organic matter to explore the generative principles of how complex systems such as botany, economics, and social networks function and the effects of interactions between different entities, whether cultures, plants or people. Jan is a member of the NYC Beekeeping group and has created BeeSpace, an audio interactive observation beehive. BeeSpace shows the bees’ natural system in an artificially built environment, which allows the viewer to have a visceral and intimate experience with the natural world. Humans are threatened by BEES, and bees certainly have been threatened by HUMANS due to environmental pollution, pesticides, disease and modern farming techniques.
PFW’s Grant to BeeSpace may be out of the ordinary realm of awards given out, but PFW believes that technology and science have a growing place in social discourse, and we cannot be blind to the fact that emerging technologies have and will effect social justice and that scientists are using their tools to make scientific art because it does communicate. We believe that culture and its roots as a scientific study have had great effects on the arts and expression. As a viewer of BeeSpace, Jan Mun invites you up to the glass that separates you from the bees and then you put on headphones and an ultrasonic sensor is triggered to increase the audio from inside the live hive. The sound increases until you no longer feel the bees are isolated and “OH DEAR” you fear that they may have escaped into the room. The question is, are either the bees or us safe within artificially built environments? Jan uses this as a social reflection and critique of our political and social systems. Jan’s original colony located in Battery Park at the tip of Manhattan which was brought up to Saint John’s the Divine for the Feast of Saint Francis and Blessing of the Animals in October, 2012 was lost to Hurricane Sandy.
