Aladin Borioli

Residency report
Eyebeam Rapid Response for a Better Digital Future (Phase 2) — 2020
With Joris Landman, Harry Bloch and Ellen Lapper

His work borrows methods from ethnography and art and combine them with the practice of beekeeping. The results are polymorphous ethnographies, which mix different media such as text, photography, sound, videos. His project Apian also aims to be collaborative and has been a site for meeting around shared sensibilities, for example with the neurobiologist Randolf Menzel and the artists Laurent Güdel and Ellen Lapper.

The Intimacy Machine is a web platform that serves as a refuge where humans are able to have egalitarian encounters with bees without the need for physical proximity. The work pushes against the profit-driven technology used for managing the production of bee colonies by providing space for aesthetic and intimate encounters with them for anyone to experience for free on the Internet. During Phase 2, the project will integrate live-streaming and data visualisation in tandem with developing a blueprint for using technology in beekeeping and spreading this knowledge to a wider audience.

Residency report
EXECAL — 2019
An Intimacy Machine, the piece I am developing during my residency at La Becque, is part of a broader DIY research endeavour called Apian which addresses the ancient inter-species relationship between bees and humans. Following an anthropological approach combined with art and beekeeping, the project gathers together multiple fragments which are both autonomous and related to one another. The machine which was developed at La Becque is inspired by new technology which has gradually infiltrated the world of beekeeping called “electronic monitored hives (E.M.Hs)”. Broadly speaking, an E.M.H. does not refer to a new hive design but to the idea of filling a beehive with multiple sensors – from temperature, scaling, sonic and so on – which track and record bee behaviour in order to help beekeeping become less time-consuming and more efficient. The policy integrated in an E.M.H. has a clearly defined aim, i.e. to make beekeeping more methodical and ultimately reduce the human component. Focusing on sonic data, the Intimacy Machine aims to invert the E.M.H’s integrated policy and transform quantitative data into qualitative data. This hack turns the E.M.H.’s surveillance protocol into an aesthetic one which aims to create a refugium where human beings and bees can meet on more equal terms. Ultimately, this ongoing project will offer a non-human distribution of the sensible. — Aladin Borioli

Biography
After completing a Bachelor in Photography at the ECAL/Ecole Cantonale d’Art de Lausanne (2014), Aladin Borioli pursued his own artistic practice and developed the DIY humanities research project Apian. Apian explores the age-old interspecies relationship between bees and humans. This research brought him closer to the humanities, hence the decision to undertake a master’s degree in Visual and Media Anthropology at the Freie Universität Berlin (2018).