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Circle of Bees Art

While Circle of Bees is itself an artwork, it also produces art. In collaboration with local artists.

Within a framework of ecological ethics, we work as a collective to illuminate sub/urban space with spectacles of ecological utopianism. We intend to elevate and entertain the public with visions of a beatiful future build on agrarian rennaissance and rewilding of city space. While our artworks are popular, pleasurable, and adventuresome, they are also critical of the comfortable status-quo in the first-world, and especially the educated elite.

Critique of Science

We are critical of science; we don't criticize the methodology, we point out that what we call science today is much more like what we call religion: an institution capable of generating mass-consumable reality. Science is a god that pretends not to exists.

We think this phenomenon needs acknowledgement by the scientific community; the science god must be identified. Doing so allows us to understand and utilize science as a form of religion, but also to acknowledge that religion is in fact an older form of science.

There is badly needed political, cultural healing in the reconcilliation, and in it lives our salvation.

We assert that the scientific paradigm is fundamentally broken. At its foundation it lacks an ecological ethics.

Today emulation of first-world lifestyle is the single most destructive Our ideas is that ecological wealth trickles down, sideways, backways, forward-ways, and every which way. Therefore, if we raise ecological concerns to the status of fine art, it naturally becomes the project of the wealthy and high-status.

All Circle of Bees' artworks can be read in the context of asserting a scientific deity; we create a mythos of scientific realism in its proper context, which is the dream and hope of ultra conservationism. We define ultra conservationism simply as so: the opposite of extinction.

Resurrection Cycle

Resurrection Cycle is the title of an art installation that took place in Central Park Davis over the weekend of April 19-21 in 2019. The art is a utilitarian, example of ecological

Honey Bee Swarm Capture Art Installation at the Davis Food Co-po

For two weeks in fall 2019 our swarm capture network hung from the metalwork of the Co-op entrance.

A Corporation as Art

Circle of Bees is founded on the idea that a corporation can be not only an artwork, but a good one. By a good artwork, we mean art that is answerable to the ethics which are informed by the best intelligence of our times. Today these are, according to this artist, the ethics of natural conservation and ecological stewardship.

But an ethical corporation? Surely, we must be joking!

Yes, it is a joke. As a corporation, Circle of Bees is an exercise in pure laughter and best understood in the context of the old saying "laughter best medicine".

While the history and precent by which corporations became classified with the same rights as people in the American legal tradition may be nothing other than grotesque, all origin stories are a bit dark.

By engaging in the practice of corporation-making as art, Circle of Bees postulates a pimordial model for art that is crafted in a the most powerful medium available to the contemporary artist.

We celebrate the power of what exists to make a better world for all, no matter how it came to be. In this way Circle of Bees is the manifestation of a practice of self-healing, in a world badly in need of it.

Utilitarian Folk Art

The practice of corporation-making cast in this light be understood like a work of portraiture as well as a form of conceptual art. Specifically we consider the work in the context of the unfortunate history which resulted corporate personhood.

Ecological Ethics in Art

Starting with the most egalitarian understanding of art we are capable of producing: art is some one doing some thing, we must next ask: What makes it good?

Today art is everywhere. We scramble over ourselves to consume the newest object in as spectacular a fashion as our status and resources allow.

However, what need have we for more things? We declare the object as art to be a failing paradigm and we wish it a speedy end.

Art in the anthropocene is a new kind of old feeling. It is an ecological ethics.

We ask: if the medium is the message, what is its impact?

Today we can calculate the metrics of space time within the boundary of a black hole and dream of colonizing Proxima b, however our cities are malnourished and the monarch butterfly faces extinction.

We stand at a techno-crossroads like no time on record. Shall we choose a techno-hell wherein those with the best defenses huddle, armed to the teeth in protective bunkers while the planet dies? Or shall we spark an agrarian renaissance, rapidly rewild, and rebuild our ecological wealth such that the planet once again.

The Circle of Bees art project is a model for a mode of self-replicating cultural consumable which produces an ecological ethics. We call this the future of art.