2019 | Interactive Media Experience
Collaborators | Takeria Blunt, Patrick Fiorilli
“This is the common belief that bees must be made acquainted with the death of any member of the family, otherwise these intelligent little creatures will either desert the hive in a pet, or leave off working and die inside of it. The old way of doing this was for the goodwife of the house to go and hang the stand of hives with black, the usual symbol of mourning, she at the same time softly humming some doleful tune herself. Another way was for the master to approach the hives and rap gently upon them. When the bee’s attention was thus secured, he would say in a low voice that such or such person — mentioning the name — was dead.”
Samuel Adams Drake, New England Legends and Folk-Lore, 1911
Telling the Bees is a prototype of an immersive media experience that explores the connections among ritual, tangible interfaces, and procedural interactivity. The project provides a basis for further exploration of hybrid interfaces in contexts of culture and tradition, specifically ritual traditions. We build upon the historical practice of “telling the bees,” in which beekeepers and their families would share important news with their bees. A conversation between the interactor and the platform is mediated by tactile and vocal inputs with procedural audio-visual feedback. The interface encourages body postures and input-response dynamics to bridge ritual tradition and digital immersion.
TEI ’19 ACM ISBN 978-1-4503-6196-5/19/03.
