Imagine a hybrid medium combining telepathy, television and apiary. A medium of the occult dithering in an interstitial space somewhere between vaporware, fiction and the Internet. It can transmit pictures of the dead and transport the living into the past, into a pre-lapsarian Eden, where the dead write themselves as poems in an ancient, dead language. To us they appear as letters of the alphabet and the photons that give us television images. But also as the noise made by bees. And not just any bees, but specialty bees from Mesopotamia. Such is the medium discovered by Jacob Maker, beekeeper and designer of flight simulators, narrator and protagonist of David Blair's Wax or the Discovery of Television Among the Bees (1991).

David Blair's Wax has been described as "one of the landmarks of media culture"(1); an assessment made in 1994 that is even more relevant today. At a time when terms such as hypermedia were still gaining currency and artists were struggling to find ways to utilize the creative potential of the Internet, Wax made its prophetic appearance on the scene. To the cognoscente of the cultural avant-garde, such as William Gibson and David Byrne, Wax was an unprecedented media text. The problem of categorizing it was an index of its distinctive contribution to an emerging art form based around the convergence of traditional art practices and the recombinant technology of the computer. Gibson and Byrne probably didn't realize it, but what they were looking at, listening to and thinking about was the first film made for the electronic age.