Mike Bianco

Following a national pattern, Michigan’s honey bee populations are declining rapidly. Since 2005, 30% of all honey bee colonies in the US have been lost each year, a condition known as Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD). Because honey bees pollinate nearly all of the fruits, vegetables, and nuts grown in Michigan, this population decline is emerging as a significant threat to the state’s food production. The agriculture and food industry generates over $90 billion for the state’s economy annually. Fruits like apples, cherries, and blueberries are central to Michigan’s cultural identity, with festivals promoting a Made In Michigan pride. It’s essential that key stakeholders in the state outline and implement strategies to address the decline in honey bee health before these crucial insects disappear.

ABSTRACT By focusing on my relationship with honeybees within the context of the current global honeybee crises, this paper will present a first-person account of my practice and research over the past five years – a kind of textual ‘waggle dance’1 that describes an experiential understanding of where I have been on my journey, and perhaps even the quality of what I have discovered along the way. Here I will present the wide array of materials and methods I have engaged, ranging from social practice and activism to laboratory-based explorations, in my attempts to both performatively and biophysically become a humyn-honeybee2 (Homo Apis). Such a form of self-analysis is offered both as reflexive critique and as a means to exhibit some of the tendencies and pitfalls that come with performing non-humyn subjectivity.

By focusing on my relationship with honeybees within the context of the current global honeybee crises, this paper will present a first-person account of my practice and research over the past five years – a kind of textual ‘waggle dance’11 The ‘waggle dance’ described by Karl von Frisch in 1967 is one of the primary forms of honeybee behaviours known to man. In it, a forager bee will make figure-eight gestures along the surface of the honeycomb, waggling her abdomen as a means of describing the location, distance and quality of a resource of value to the hive.
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that describes an experiential understanding of where I have been on my journey, and perhaps even the quality of what I have discovered along the way. Here I will present the wide array of materials and methods I have engaged, ranging from social practice and activism to laboratory-based explorations, in my attempts to both performatively and biophysically become a humyn-honeybee22 The use of the spelling ‘humyn’ is a gesture to both feminist discourse on ‘human’ subjectivity in addition to pointing to the writing of Timothy Morton as a means to denote a shift in my own special subjectivity that acknowledges the body as a chimeric ‘queer’ ecology.
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(Homo Apis). Such a form of self-analysis is offered both as reflexive critique and as a means to exhibit some of the tendencies and pitfalls that come with performing non-humyn subjectivity.

My thoughts on the state of the world in this thesis are based on my three years of coursework and fellowships on the topics of Sustainability, Alternative (Hi)stories, and Localization, in addition to my observations as a graduate student of the social, environmental, political, and economic conditions of production during my visits to Portland, Oregon; Oaxaca, México; Fukushima, Japan; Tanzania; and Dow Chemical Headquarters. These experiences have been moulded by my interactions with such thinkers as Bunker Roy, Ron Broglio, and Tom Seeley, and artists such as Lee Mingwei, Ben Kinmont, Steve Lambert, Oron Catts, and Amy Youngs. These observations and encounters have been tempered by years of reading the works of authors that range from Henry Thoreau and Peter Kropotkin, to David Harvey, Rob Nixon, and Masanobu Fukuoka. I have, whenever possible, tried to remain intellectually omnivorous in an attempt to digest the breadth of work that attempts to confront the meaning of humanity in an age of self-aware, self-inflicted annihilation. I have been careful to meld both data and empiricism, which in aggregate serve as a foundation on which I understand and address the world as an artist, activist, and craftsperson. At times my thesis will be fortified by data, but will most often be based in an empiricism of the spirit. I do not claim to be right. I don’t know that I believe in singular answers any more. An array of responses, made with positive intentions and strong insight, seems to be the only approach to the impending “century of crises” and what I describe as the “great transition.” However, as I intend to demonstrate, my work seeks to occupy a hybrid practice, one that reconsiders Joseph Beuys’ notion of Social Sculpture and his famous maxim “everyone is an artist,” and reframes it through the writings of Lucy Lippard, Howard Risatti, Octavio Paz, and Chögyam Trungpa into a theory of “Social Craft.” It is my position that everyone is a craftsperson, each of us endowed with the capacities to mindfully transform society in preparation for the Great Transition. Furthermore, I look to honeybee society as a model for social transformation. I contend, as others such as Kropotkin have, that the honeybee exhibits a profound model when considering methods of social change. Therefore, it is my intention in this thesis to demonstrate what a Social Craft practice could be, with the hope that others will realize their own capacities to positively participate in the great transition.

Michigan’s current level of food production and its agricultural economy are in jeopardy due to drastic honey bee population declines across the state over the past seven years. This problem should be a priority for policy makers; honey bee losses affect almost everyone in the state because over a third of the food we consume is pollinated by bees. The causes of honey bee population decline are multiple and interconnected. A growing body of research shows that the principal factors involved are parasites and pathogens, environmental stressors, and monocrop farming, widespread use of pesticides, and industrial beekeeping practices within the paradigm of conventional industrial agriculture. In addition to individual stressors, there are synergetic interactions between some stressors that increase the vulnerability of managed honey bee colonies. Many of Michigan’s agricultural products—such as soybeans, dry beans, apples, blueberries, cherries, cucumbers, and other produce—depend on honey bee pollination to produce a good crop. Michigan is a state that relies heavily on pollination services to maintain its agricultural production, but it has been hard hit by honey bee population declines. Honey bee losses of more than 30% annually have been reported by Michigan beekeepers over the past few years, with the 2013/2014 winter poised to be even worse. Honey bee population declines in Michigan will likely not improve, and could continue to worsen, unless the problem is addressed by policy makers and other stakeholders in a substantive way. Because the problem involves many different causal factors and actors spanning agricultural production and consumption, potential solutions are also complex. There are various local-level mitigation measures that beekeepers, farmers, and the general public can implement, such as improving communication with beekeepers about pesticide application, reducing or eliminating the use of insecticides, and improving the area of habitat for bee-friendly forage. Initiatives to connect and support Michigan beekeepers using sustainable practices are also promising. But on their own, local steps are likely not enough to stem honey bee population declines; higher-level institutional approaches are also needed. A combination of facilitated dialogue among key Michigan stakeholders, legislation, and litigation originating at the state or national level could provide the additional impetus needed to rein in and reverse honey bee colony losses in the state. This paper provides recommendations for effectively implementing a multi-stakeholder dialogue process, and proposes modifications to legislation targeted at improving honey bee populations nationally.

Presentation focused on inter-species hospitality which explores the question "what does it mean to be a humyn in the age of the Anthropocene?"

Presentation is placed within the context of my own practice which explores the necessity of humynkind's necessity for social evolution in light of biophysical collapse, and framed by such thinkers as Irina Aristarkhova,  Joseph Beuys, Ron Broglio, Jacques Derrida, Helen and Newton Harrison, and Amy Youngs.

In the past few years questions of sustainability and what needs to be done about “unsustainable lives” have been taken up by various constituents, including artists. Ecofeminist, anti-capitalist, and anti-colonial movements and creative works have taught us about the role of political economy in unsustainability. This panel, comprised of artists, curators and scholars who are interested in social practice and new media art, will discuss examples of art works, including their own, where these movements are present, but in new forms, arguably, in their “post-” reincarnations (postnatural, posthuman, postcritical). Here the “post” is not about overcoming or constantly reflecting back, but building on the critiques of capitalism, settler colonialism and patriarchy for the future. Artists work with farmers, environmental scientists, and evolving communities, often pondering over their own role and what “making art” means today. We want to open up a dialogue on these contested practices and corresponding shifting identities of their makers.

Inspired by the scholarship of Benedict Anderson and Hayden White, this panel reconsiders how imagined communities and the imagined unknown shaped the representation of ‘the real’ in the nineteenth century. Through this lens, we will examine how fiction helped define the unknown, operating as a tool for the invention of history, identity, and the augmentation of reality. Of specific interest will be the nineteenth-century legacies of territorial expansion, scientific invention, and the formulation of nations, utopias, and ‘the other.’ By returning to the era that formalized history into a field of study, we will also reconsider the role of fiction in the making of history and what a contemporary structure for history making, both for the past and present, could be.

Although this panel is strongly rooted in the tradition of art history, it is our intention to facilitate a dialogue between art historians and research-driven studio practices.