Hivemind

Gwyan Rhabyt / USA

California State University East Baynone

www.gwyanrhabyt.net/

Hive Mind connects an active beehive in the Santa Cruz mountains of coastal California with a gallery installation built of over 1750 individually programmable LEDs in a creative, abstract visualization. The beehive is tracked in real time with sensors monitoring the temperature, humidity, sound level, activity level, population, honey reserves, and, via cameras and computer vision algorithms, the arrival and departure of each bee as it forages. This information streams live from a small computer at the hive to another computer at the gallery which uses the data to control LEDs hanging from an aluminum frame in a 3D configuration. It is wall mounted with core dimensions of 193cm x 160cm x 61cm. The software guiding the visualization are custom written by the artist in the Processing and C++ languages. The viewer in the gallery sees all 1750 LEDs in the work, with a lower core representing the most profound rhythms with colors and volume responding to the slow changing data from inside the hive (temperature, population etc), this is overloaded with patterns responding to sound and activity levels and and above this sudden small flashes on the periphery of the piece that correspond to the transits of individual bees.