Swarm (ASX)

This ambitious installation is a dynamic modeling of the global economy in terms of beekeeping, and was installed on the Upper Island Lawn on Cockatoo Island for the 18th Biennale of Sydney (2012). Swarm (ASX) and The bee library juxtapose traditional and contemporary representations of economy and knowledge, 'money' and 'honey'.

Swarm (ASX)
This installation translates beehives into a model of the economy. Finlay takes the fluctuations of the stock market and represents them as the ‘buzz’ of Australian honey-bees (recorded by sound-artist Chris Watson), broadcast from 10 multi-storied wooden hives. Each hive stack bears the acronym of a major stock exchange – New York, Toronto, Sao Paulo, London, Frankfurt, Mumbai, Shanghai, Hong Kong, Tokyo, and Sydney – and produces a stream of audio, a buzzing that varies in density and volume in accordance with economic activity. Swarm (ASX) is a snapshot of speculative finance translated into the natural ecosystem of bees: dynamic, in flux, undergoing crisis, confronting potential catastrophe.

honey-bee recordings, Chris Watson; sound and data, Jamie Allen & Bernhard Garnicnig

The bee library
Finlay's second project features 24 specially constructed ‘book nests' for bees. These provide shelter for solitary 'wild' bees, considered unproductive in economic terms. The bee library processes bee-related texts in order to produce a harvest of knowledge. Once read the books are converted it into hybrid 'nests', while the information that the artist has gleaned is converted into a blog. The project will extend beyond the Biennale, evolving into a global bee library.

Alec Finlay is an internationally recognised artist whose work crosses over a range of media and forms – from poetry, sculpture and collage, to audio-visual, neon and new technologies. Much of Finlay’s work reflects on our interaction with nature and considers how we as a culture, or cultures, relate to landscape. Finlay describes his work as ‘microtonal’, combining a number of smaller elements within a wider field, often drawing on his experience with innovative poetic forms, such as the embedded mesostic and circle poem, and major interventions, such as his use of windmill turbines and pervasive web-based media projects. Finlay weaves together generous experiential works, often collaborative, sometimes mapped directly onto the landscape, at other times embedded socially and online.

Artist Statement
This ambitious installation is a dynamic apicultural model of the global speculative economy in terms of beekeeping. Each hive stack bears the acronym of a major stock exchange – New York, Toronto, São Paulo, London, Frankfurt, Mumbai, Shanghai, Hong Kong, Tokyo and Sydney – and produces a stream of audio, a buzzing that varies in density and volume in accordance with economic activity. Swarm (ASX) is a snapshot of speculative finance translated into the natural ecosystem of bees: dynamic, in flux, undergoing crisis, confronting potential catastrophe.