Flows and Scapes: Beescapes

Globalisation and the way we understand it’s micro and macro relationships and processes related to media is difficult to describe with certainty, as you finish typing a sentence it has changed by the time you look up.

The concept of scapes developed by Appadurai (1998, p. 33) will be discussed here which came from the alternate idea of Global Flows being too vague in describing global movements but includes, similarly, 5 terms: ethno, techno, finance media and ideo –scapes.

Appadurai writes:

            The suffix -scape allows us to point to the fluid, irregular shapes of these landscapes, shapes that characterise international capital as deeply as they do international clothing styles. These terms, with the common suffix -scape, also indicate that these are not objectively given relations that look the same from every angle of vision but, rather, that they are deeply perspectival constructs, inflected by the historical, linguistic, and political situatedness of different sorts of actors: nation-states, multinationals, diasporic communities, as well as sub-national groupings and movements (whether religious, political, or economic), and even intimate face-to-face groups, such as villages, neighbourhoods and families.” (Appadurai 1998, p. 33, cited in Rantanen 2005, p. 13)

This idea of globalisation as an observable landscape or irregular shape being understood differently according to perspective in time and space, cultural, political and economic position sounds similar to me to the appreciation of modern art. Sculpture especially.

The 3-BEE printing project (a pun on 3-D printing) brought together a master bee-keeper, a sculpture artist and 80, 000 bees to create a pretty outstanding example of a visible 3D –scape made up of the individual micro efforts of the bees under control of a human designed enveloping bubble producing a big picture macro level structure.

Interdependency developed between bee and artist through a lab simulated environment for the conditions for optimum hive growth by the bee-keepers design. Temperature control as well as food supply encouraged the bees to build within the shell of the desired sculpture. 

The industrious bees continued to work as they would under natural condition witless to their contribution to a sculpture. Changing perspective, the bee’s home becomes the artists sculpture as mediated by the beekeeper.

REFERENCES:

Rantanen, T. (2005) The Media and Globalization, Sage, London, pp. 1-18