By combining many techniques a story is told here that turns out to be made up of many stories, a non-linear short story in hypertext, hyperimage and sound. One of the locations in this work is Alamogordo (New Mexico), the place where the first nuclear bombs were tested. Jacob Maker (played by Blair), is a programmer working on the development of 'smart bombs'. Next to this his great passion is the Mesopotamian bee colony he inherited from his grandfather. One day, while he is busy with his bees, he discovers Bee TV. The bees plant a crystal 'television' in his head and Jacob can now communicate with the dead. He travels between past and future, life and death, the Earth and the moon, and looks through many eyes at the world, studies forms he has already embodied and his reincarnation, among others, into a 'smart bomb' and thus plays a role in the Gulf War. He gets to know worlds such as that of the Future Dead and the history of his family: for instance about his grandfather James Maker, and his half-sister Ella who was a member of the Supernormal Picture Community which already at the start of this century had plans to film the dead on Antarctica. In a story in which fiction and reality are thoroughly intertwined, the stories and histories also prove to be linked together and cut through time, space and events, and time changes into space. In a combination of archive footage, video and computer animations – with that strange, monotone voice-over – a thick fabric of related images/stories is presented with a considerable number of striking details. The video 'Wax, or the Discovery of Television among the Bees' was completed in 1991; it formed the basis for the website (1994) and this CD-ROM is the last, and once again revised, version of this project.
– Carla Hoekendijk
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David Blair ° 1956, Los Angeles (USA)
Lives and works in New York (USA), Paris (France)
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