Regine's in the throes of art-meets-technology sensory overload at the Royal College of Art graduate exhibition in London. That's where she saw Susana Soares' project, Bee's, which explores "how we might co-habit with natural biological systems and use their potential to increase our perceptive abilities," or in other words, to train bees to sniff out a pregnancy.
Apparently, it only takes a few minutes to condition bees' Pavlovian reflexes to respond to whatever pheremonal or chemical trigger you wish, including those associated with explosives, certain diseases, and fertility cycles. After inserting the bees into Soares' dual-chambered, blown glass breathing apparatus, you just put your lips together and blow. If you've got it, the bees would, er, make a beeline to whatever it is they've been trained to detect.
That's the concept, anyway. It's all kind of hypothetical at this point. In the mean time, you just know that as soon as that grad show is over, Soares and her friends are gonna dump the bees, fire that thing up and really get the buzzing started.
Bee's by Susana Soares [rca.ac.uk via wmmna]
