Beatie Wolfe

A singer songwriter with a raw, acoustic, indie rock sound​.​.. hailed "Brilliant" by GQ, "Captivating" by WIRED, "Mesmerising" by MOJO & "Breathtaking" by The New Yorker

[beatiewolfe]

Forbes profile imPRINTING by Beatie Wolfe at Museum of Science Boston

Pick Up The Phone And Listen In On Artist Beatie Wolfe’s Brain

Leslie Katz, Senior Contributor

Jan 29, 2025,08:00am EST

What’s it like to step inside someone else’s mind? That’s the question conceptual artist and composer Beatie Wolfe invites visitors to explore with her installation “Imprinting,” a sprawling sonic self-portrait of her brain getting its U.S. debut at Boston’s Museum of Science this week.

The installation features listening stations where participants tune in to “channels” that broadcast Wolfe’s original soundscapes — mosaics of conversations, music, poems and random sounds, each representing different regions of the brain and their respective functions. One station, for example, focuses on the cerebral cortex, which is involved in complex tasks such as reasoning and problem solving, while another highlights Wernicke’s area, considered key to language comprehension.

The channel for the limbic system, a part of the brain that gets activated when we listen to music, plays Wolfe’s own compositions, from her first taped demo as a 9 year old to present songs that lean toward folk and indie rock. For the channel connected to the hippocampus, the brain’s primary memory center, the Anglo-American artist recorded herself reading many hours of old journal entries spanning her adolescence.

“If you were to listen to that, you’d hear essentially someone aging from 11 to 19 — these inner monologues, thoughts, reflections, poems, rants, transmissions, breakdowns, breakthroughs,” Wolfe said over Zoom from London, where she lives when not in Los Angeles. “The way I think about it is if that area of the brain could speak, that’s probably what it would sound like.”

“Imprinting,” which premiered at the 2023 London Design Biennale, opens at the Museum of Science on Thursday and runs through the end of the year. The piece is both deeply personal and universally resonant, offering a window into Wolfe’s inner world while inviting visitors to reflect on their own.

“By creating a sonic brain self-portrait, it’s almost as if you create a way for other people to think what their own sonic self-portrait would be,” Wolfe said. Those unable to attend the exhibit will be able to call in to each listening station by phone using the numbers listed below.

Breaking Down Neuroscience Barriers

The stations connect wall-mounted vintage phones to a retro-futuristic data-encoded aviation cap fitted with eight glass data discs, each tied to audio from a different listening station. The bespoke hat, stored behind glass at one end of the installation, was designed by Mr. Fish, the iconic U.K. fashion brand that dressed David Bowie, Jimi Hendrix and Mick Jagger in the 1970s. Mr. Fish also created a wearable jacket for Wolfe’s 2016 album Montagu Square that let people hear its songs by tapping their phone to fabric embedded with short-range wireless technology.

For each “Imprinting” channel, Wolfe edited hundreds of hours of audio to ensure no listener hears the same sequence twice, and she collaborated with Microsoft Research Labs to encode the vast aural landscapes in the “thinking cap” connected to the phones.

For most people, clinical terms like medial prefrontal cortex won’t immediately evoke the intricacies of emotional regulation and social behavior that that part of the brain influences. The Museum of Science says “Imprinting” transforms these concepts into relatable, sensory experiences.

“The installation breaks down barriers around neuroscience and terms that can be intimidating or sterile by connecting them to our everyday experiences,” James Monroe, the museum’s creative director of programming, said in an email interview. “Our ability to collaborate, the way we communicate and build relationships, our artistry, the moments we hold dear to us throughout our lives… all of these treasured aspects of being human are directly connected first and foremost to our brain, and I think Beatie illustrates this in a singular and profound way through ‘Imprinting.’”

Inspired By An Oliver Sacks Book

Wolfe became fascinated with the mysteries of the brain after reading neurologist Oliver Sacks’ 2007 best-seller Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain, which she now calls her favorite book. In it, Sacks investigates the power of music to move and heal us.

“Even if you read a couple of case studies it changes your whole perspective on what music is,” Wolfe said.

When the artist’s father-in-law was diagnosed with dementia, the book’s insights inspired her to see what would happen if she performed music for residents of his Portuguese care home. Standing at the front of the room with her guitar playing original new songs — tunes the residents wouldn’t have recognized, and in English, a language most didn’t speak — she didn’t anticipate much of a reaction.

Instead, “I was seeing people waking up and singing along in their version and clapping,” Wolfe said. “At the end of the performance, the director of the care home said, ‘In the 16 years I’ve been here, this is the best I’ve ever seen the group. This is amazing.’”

That experience led Wolfe to conduct extensive research with Stanford University scientists into music, memory and dementia. “Music is so beyond entertainment,” she said. “It is key to our sentience as human beings in ways we’re only just beginning to understand.”

“Imprinting” is a centerpiece of the Museum of Science’s 2025 offerings related to the theme “Being Human.”

“We will explore all aspects of humanity,” the museum’s Monroe said. “Our brains and bodies, our communities, how technology has impacted and improved our lives, and what is inside that connects us all.”

How To Call Into The Listening Stations Remotely

Here are the numbers you can dial to hear each soundscape in “Imprinting.”

“Conversations” channel (representing Wernicke’s area): 617-589-0001

“Collaborations” channel (representing the medial prefrontal cortex): 617-589-0002

“Inner Self” channel (representing the hippocampus): 617-589-0003

“Outer Self” channel (representing the cerebral cortex): 617-589-0004

“Memory” channel (representing the neocortex): 617-589-0005

“Sounds” channel (representing the primary auditory cortex): 617-589-0006

“Music Rewind” channel (representing the limbic system): 617-589-0007

“Music Forward” channel (representing the limbic system): 617-589-0008

Journalist Leslie Katz, a Forbes contributor since October 2023, covers science

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Boston Globe features imPRINTING by Beatie Wolfe at Museum of Science Boston

At the Museum of Science, a sonic self-portrait brings neurology to life

Part artist and part engineer, the conceptual artist and musician Beatie Wolfe is inviting visitors into her head

By Malcolm Gay Globe Staff,Updated January 23, 2025, 3:31 p.m.

When neuroscientists say they “listen” to the brain, they’re often using electrodes to monitor some of the brain’s billions of neurons, eavesdropping on a mere sliver of the rowdy conversation from which consciousness emerges.

But visitors to the Museum of Science can listen in on the whole brain of conceptual artist and musician Beatie Wolfe, whose sonic self-portrait, “imPRINTING,” will make its US debut at the MoS on Jan. 30.

Forgoing electrodes, Wolfe’s installation uses old-school telephones connected to a retro-futuristic “thinking cap,” a sort of next-gen glass hard drive encoded with innumerable hours of audio recorded from Wolfe’s life. Pick up an individual phone line, and you can explore different areas of Wolfe’s brain via the hopes, dreams, ideas, songs, conversations, and fears associated with each region.

“It was so important for me that no two people have the same experience,” multidisciplinary artist and musician Beatie Wolfe said of her art installation "imPRINTING."Mario de Lopez

Wolfe has included hundreds of hours of recordings from her life: everything from collaborations with astronomers and musicians to adolescent journal entries and road trips. The result is a vast aural landscape.

“It was so important for me that no two people have the same experience,” the Anglo-American Wolfe, who premiered “imPRINTING” during the 2023 London Design Biennale, at Somerset House, said by phone. “Anyone coming through will hear [a] unique kind of brain picture.”

Wolfe’s multidisciplinary approach to art making has included numerous collaborations over the years. Her environmental video project, “From Green to Red,” sets to music an arresting visualization of NASA data that charts rising CO2 levels over the past 800,000 years. “Smoke and Mirrors” uses the “Blue Marble” image of Earth to display rising methane levels juxtaposed with advertising slogans from the oil industry.

She’s set to release a series of records this spring with musician and producer Brian Eno, and she previously worked with Nobel Prize-winning scientist Robert Wilson to beam her album, “Raw Space,” into outer space using the Holmdel Horn Antenna, the radio telescope Wilson and Arno Penzias used to detect evidence of the Big Bang.

“Let’s see, if we’re six years out,” said Wilson of the transmission, “it’s six light years away — somewhere.”

The initial impetus for “imPRINTING” came more than a decade ago when Wolfe read “Musicophilia,” the late neurologist Oliver Sacks’s investigation into music’s effects on the brain. When her grandmother and father-in-law were diagnosed with dementia, Wolfe decided to try playing her guitar for her relatives, eventually performing for residents at her father-in-law’s facility in Portugal.

The response, she said, was revelatory: People who had previously been quiet began to perk up, clapping and talking to one another.

“There was this sense that there’s a responsibility to do something, to keep pulling the thread,” said Wolfe, who began performing at memory-care facilities across Britain. “The idea was to see if we could recreate what happened in Portugal, but with the controls, with doctors, and essentially do our own research piece.”

She added that as she toured, she witnessed “inexplicable” moments, describing one man who’d been “virtually catatonic.”

“The carers there were just hoping to get, you know, a smile or something,” said Wolfe, who noted that the man began moving his arm in time to the music. “Then, within two minutes of the song, he’s standing up. One of the carers is going over, and I’m thinking, what’s going on? And then I realized that they’re dancing.”

Nusha Askari, executive director of the Stanford Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center, at Stanford University, said part of what she likes about Wolfe’s work is that it makes accessible the complexities of the brain.

“It’s so rare for someone to be able to draw from these different areas,” said Askari. “She has a beautiful way of integrating things.”

Even so, by the time organizers invited Wolfe to exhibit at the London Design Biennale, Wolfe said she’d grown frustrated by what she called the “binary roadmap” that differentiates artists from engineers.

“Why don’t I make something like a sonic self-portrait that shows all these different brain channels and simultaneously brings neurology to life,” Wolfe recalled thinking, “and also shows how we don’t have to be one thing or another.”

Wolfe had made a point of recording many of her adventures, and she poured hours and hours of audio into “imPRINTING.” For instance, the phone line to the “Inner Self” connects to the hippocampus, a small brain structure vital to learning and memory, revealing journal entries from her adolescence and teen years. The line that connects to the medial prefrontal cortex, a brain region associated with cognitive and emotional processing, is a “radio-style” channel that includes her space broadcast with Wilson and studio experiments with Eno, among other things. Meanwhile, a pair of lines to the limbic system, the so-called emotional nervous system, features music from throughout Wolfe’s career and new music available only through “imPRINTING.”

“Of course, to have all these brain channels, you need them to be coming out of a thinking cap,” said Wolfe. She added that the telephones are wired into the custom-made cap, which holds the audio in a novel glass technology that can store vast amounts of data without using energy.

“These tiny pieces of glass [in the cap] are at the point on the brain that they connect with,” she said. “If that part of the brain could talk, what would it sound like?”

Wolfe’s installation, which runs through the end of the year, will kick off a yearlong series of programming at the MoS devoted to being human.

James Monroe, the museum’s creative director of programming, said that in the coming year the museum will explore everything from how technology has changed our lives, to body systems, genetics, evolution, cures and treatments, mental health and aging.

Wolfe’s self-portrait “is going to touch on every single one of those themes for the year and be really inclusive,” he said. “I just thought it was a really sort of genius way of distilling some of that hardcore science into” something more accessible.

imPRINTING

Through Dec. 31. Museum of Science, 1 Science Park, 617-723-2500, www.mos.org

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Mark Mothersbaugh x Beatie Wolfe - Postcard Playbox on dublab radio

LISTEN AGAIN

Resident dublab DJ Beatie Wolfe and Devo’s Mark Mothersbaugh pull postcards from the tens of thousands they’ve received for their collective art demonstration ‘Postcards for Democracy’ and pair them with tracks of their choosing. Join this movement and potentially a future radio show by making and mailing your post art to 8760 Sunset Blvd, West Hollywood, CA 90069. Alternatively if you’re in LA drop in on one of our pop-up postcard making events. Head to www.postartfordemocracy.com for all the info about this campaign celebrating USPS, our right to vote and the power of art with support from The Broad Foundation and dublab.

Tracklist: X-Ray Spex – Bondage, up yours! Vaquita – On Her Side Blaze Foley – Oval Room Johnny Brewton – Small Metal Objects Staff Benda Bilili – Staff Benda Bilili Uno Lady – Uno Lady Sings Town of Don’t You Worry The Marvelettes – Please Mr Postman Siena Riley – Rich Kid Blues Leenalchi – Tiger is Coming Yuri Suzuki – AI Acid Mort Garson – Symphony for a Spider Plant Ian Svenonius – Rebel Outlaw Aretha Franklin – Think

POSTCARDS FOR DEMOCRACY Ahead of the 2024 November presidential election, artistic visionaries Mark Mothersbaugh and Beatie Wolfe join forces to re-activate Postcards For Democracy – their non-partisan, collective post art campaign with support from The Eli & Edythe Broad Foundation and dublab. This collective post art campaign, originally launched in lockdown ahead of the 2020 election, stirred tens of thousands of people to create and contribute to the public art movement, supporting USPS in the process, and all the while reminding and mobilizing people to vote. Mothersbaugh and Wolfe received postcards from every part of the U.S. (and across the world) with the ever-growing collection first exhibited at the Rauschenberg Gallery before a selection of the art went into the Smithsonian. Such a chord was struck that post art is still being received today four years on! As democracy and our right to vote still hangs in the balance, Postcards for Democracy invites everyone and anyone to create a piece of mail art and send it in to become part of this public art demo, with an exhibition and book to follow. With the aim of the campaign being to encourage as many people as possible to vote, you can join it by buying stamps, making a piece of postcard art and mailing it to: 8760 Sunset Blvd, West Hollywood, CA 90069.

Audio mastered by Soundwell Photos by Mario de Lopez

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An Audience with iconic punk publisher V. Vale hosted by Beatie Wolfe and Aaron Rose

An Audience with iconic punk publisher V. Vale hosted by Beatie Wolfe and Aaron Rose

April 16th, 2023 at 3pm (PT) at dublab, 1035 W 24th St, Los Angles, CA 90007

Come celebrate the life and work of one of this world’s true originals, San Francisco counterculture publisher and curator V. Vale, at dublab’s new HQ, hosted by artists Aaron Rose and Beatie Wolfe. 

It’s rare to meet an artist who still embodies everything they stood for when they first began their mission. But that’s V. Vale: a writer, publisher, researcher, documenter, musician, and constant curator and contributor to the counterculture continuum. Described as the last 70s punk publisher, Vale is in perpetual motion, “a verb” in full evolutionary process. 

After launching San Francisco’s first punk zine Search & Destroy in 1977 with $100 each from Allen Ginsberg and Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Vale founded RE/SEARCH in 1980 for his other cultural-anthropological explorations including Industrial music, the writings of J.G. Ballard and William S. Burroughs, feminism, plus “Incredibly Strange” filmmaking and music.

This event includes a conversation between Vale, Aaron Rose and Beatie Wolfe, a live DJ set from Money Mark on tape cassettes, cat haikus, a live performance from Vale and Marian and more. 

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Cool Hunting feature Beatie Wolfe x Global Music Vault project

Global Music Vaults mission to preserve music for 10,000 years

THIS ARCHIVAL PROJECT STORES DATA ON MICROSOFT'S NEW, SILICA GLASS PLATTERS

by Kelly Pau

The 21st century is characterized by rapid musical innovation, from streaming thousands of songs online with a click of a button to storing albums on the cloud. Within all this progress, though, one element hasn’t advanced like the others: longevity. In comparison to hieroglyphs, which have endured nearly 5,00 years, music storage is ephemeral, beginning to deteriorate as early as five years on a hard drive or 15 years when stored as CDs. To solve this preservation problem, Global Music Vault is on a mission to safeguard the world’s music for as long as 10,000 years.

To do so, the organization Global Music utilizes a vault that is specifically dedicated for music capsules. It’s located deep inside Norway’s arctic mountains—the same mountains where the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, a vault dedicated to preserving the world’s seeds, is located. Because the music data will run into the tens of petabytes per year, archiving them is complex, requiring a solution that can hold a large volume of data while protecting against its fragility. To navigate these challenging conditions, Global Music turned to Microsoft’s new glass platters, the world’s first storage technology designed and built from the media up, specifically for the cloud.

The platters stem from a Microsoft research project dubbed “Project Silica,” which uses recent discoveries in ultrafast laser optics and machine learning. As such, the glass is capable of holding 100GB of data or 20,000 songs for around 10,000 years.

The platters are akin to a glass hard drive that’s read like a CD. The proof-of-concept glass platter measures three by three inches and begins as quartz glass. Microsoft uses the hyper-fast femtosecond laser to etch data as 3D patterns into the glass, which a second laser can then read and translate (via algorithms) into songs. Glass, an inert material, offers an improved level of security for data keeping, as it is fully resilient to electromagnetic pulses and challenging environmental conditions. In other words, the glass can be baked, boiled, scoured, flooded and more, and the data will still be preserved.

The silica glass will contain music and audio and visual contributions from from Sweden’s Polar Music Prize, New Zealand’s Alexander Turnbull Library Collections, the International Library of African Music and the International Music Council, which contributed work from the Orchestra of Indigenous Instruments and New Technologies.

The vault will also store a selection of tracks from mixed-media musician Beatie Wolfe, whose work in pioneering new formats (including beaming her music into space) is an apt pairing for the innovative archival endeavor. “From my perspective I wanted to get involved because my work is about bridging the tangible and digital to get the best of the old and the best of the new,” Wolfe tells us. “This feels like the epitome of that for music preservation and, in an age where music has become increasingly disposable and devalued, this is a wonderful reminder of its longterm value for humanity, and we need longterm thinking now more than ever as we face this climate emergency.”

As the music industry and modern culture at large increasingly focus on creating new works at a rapid pace, Global Music Vault’s project honors music already in existence, working to preserve its longevity with paradigm-breaking technology.

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Billboard feature Beatie Wolfe x Global Music Vault project

Microsoft-Made Glass Encoded With Thousands of Songs Headed to Doomsday Vault in Norway

BY RICHARD SMIRKE

LONDON —A Norwegian company that is planning to create a doomsday vault to preserve the world’s most important music works has partnered with Microsoft on what it calls a “paradigm-breaking” storage solution capable of holding recordings for many thousands of years.

Oslo-based Elire Group teamed up with the tech giant to come up with a “proof of concept” silica glass platter that can be used as a medium for storing master-quality digital copies of music recordings, which are burnt into the glass using state-of-the-art laser optics.

Elire plans to initially store the glass capsules in a dedicated space inside the Arctic World Archive, an existing underground storage facility located on a remote arctic island midway between Norway and the North Pole.

Opened in 2017, the Arctic World Archive houses digital copies of historical artifacts like Vatican Library manuscripts and paintings by Rembrandt and Edvard Munch. It’s located deep inside the same snow-covered mountain as the Global Seed Vault, a backup storage facility for the world’s genetic resources. Both are designed to withstand natural and man-made disasters, including nuclear attacks.

The Global Music Vault, which was first revealed last year, will offer music recordings the same level of extreme protection, says Elire, the commercial venture group financing the project.

“Today’s digital and physical data storage methods are fast becoming outdated and obsolete,” says Luke Jenkinson, managing director of the Global Music Vault and managing partner at Elire. He calls the silica glass format designed by Microsoft a “future-proof solution” that meets the music industry’s need for secure long-term storage for recordings.

The importance of safe storage for music recordings was underscored by a 2008 fire at a Universal Studios backlot that saw a significant number of tapes archived by Universal Music Group destroyed, including some masters, although the company had secondary copies of many of them.

There are also potential risks with digital storage. MySpace confirmed in 2019 that a server migration led to the loss of up to 50 million uploaded tracks.

The Global Music Vault and silica glass capsules developed by Microsoft will offer far greater levels of protection, says Jenkinson, providing migration-free storage that has a data lifetime of many thousands of years. “The music data they store basically lasts forever,” he tells Billboard.

A team at Microsoft’s Research Lab in Cambridge, England, developed the silica glass storage capsules, as part of its Project Silica program. The thin square glass capsules measure 75mm x75mm x 2mm— roughly the size of a glass drink coaster. They are fully resilient to electromagnetic pulses and can be baked, boiled, scoured, frozen and submerged in water without the data written onto the glass suffering any degradation, Elire says.

The proof-of-concept music capsule holds 150GB of data (equivalent to approximately 215 CDs), although Jenkinson believes the silica glass format will soon be capable of holding one terabyte of data (1,000 GB) and may eventually be able to hold up to 10 terabytes.

Digital copies of music recordings are encoded into the capsules by ultra-fast lasers, which create layers of three-dimensional nanoscale gratings and deformations in the glass. To retrieve the information, in this case music recordings, Microsoft has developed machine learning algorithms that read the data back by decoding images and patterns that are created as polarized light shines through the glass.

Jurgen Willis, Microsoft’s vice president of program management, says storing data on fused silica glass “can help achieve the goal of preserving and safeguarding the world’s most valuable music for posterity, on a medium that will stand the test of time.”

Prior to partnering with Microsoft, Elire had explored other ways of sustainably preserving music data, including using binary coding and high-density QR codes written onto special durable optical film, which is also designed to last more 1,000 years. The company says it is open to using different tech storage solutions alongside its ongoing partnership with Microsoft.

At present, only one glass music data capsule has been made as a proof of concept. It contains copies of culturally important music recordings owned by the International Library of African Music, The National Library of New Zealand, Kenya’s Ketebul Music archive and Lebanon’s Fayha Choir, as well as audio visual content from Sweden’s Polar Music Prize, including interviews with Patti Smith and Paul Simon, and live performances by Manfred Mann and Stevie Wonder.

The test capsule also features a selection of works by Anglo-American singer-songwriter Beatie Wolfe, who has regularly experimented with technology and innovative distribution methods, including beaming her music into space using New Jersey’s historic Holmdel Horn Antenna.

Wolfe calls the Global Music Vault an important development in music preservation. “In an age where music has become increasingly disposable and devalued, this is a wonderful reminder of its long-term value for humanity,” she says.

The vault’s first deposits, which will include the inaugural proof of concept capsule, were originally scheduled for this year but will now take place in fall 2023 due to delays caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, says Jenkinson. At first, they will be placed inside the Arctic World Archive, although Elire wants to build its own dedicated vault on the Svalbard archipelago, which is a demilitarized zone, and eventually commercialize the venture by charging companies and artists for making deposits.

In the meantime, organizers are launching its global Project ARV, calling for national music business groups to nominate culturally important music to be preserved in the vault. Elire has partnered with the Paris-based International Music Council to form a global committee that will oversee the selection process.

“We want the whole world to know about the Global Music Vault, get involved and help shape it with us,” says Jenkinson. “If the music industry can start looking at greener tech alternatives for storing music, then it can really reduce its footprint, as well as safeguarding music for the future.”

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Dezeen Magazine highlights Beatie Wolfe COP26 Projection which visualises rising CO2 levels

Beatie Wolfe visualises rising CO2 levels on Glasgow's Armadillo building at COP26

Beatie Wolfe projects climate change artwork on COP26 venue

Musician and artist Beatie Wolfe projected her artwork From Green to Red onto the SEC Armadillo, a 3,000-seat venue designed by Foster + Partners.

The projection, which reaches 34 metres in height and covers the entire facade of the distinctive building, visualises rising levels of CO2 in the atmosphere based on 800,000 years of NASA data. An interactive version of the video installation was previewed exclusively on Dezeen last year as part of Virtual Design Festival.

"With this projection I wanted people to be able to see something that is often hard to visualise – that of rising CO2 levels – and for it to activate awareness in a way that goes in deep and imprints," Wolfe told Dezeen. "And COP26 is the most impactful setting for this large-scale environmental protest piece."

The SEC Armadillo, named for its resemblance to the armoured mammal, is part of the Scottish Event Campus where the COP26 conference is taking place.

[beatiewolfe]

BBC World Service profiled Beatie Wolfe on The Cultural Frontline

Beatie Wolfe: Art against climate change

The Cultural Frontline

Beatie Wolfe is a musician and experimental artist whose been described as a “musical weirdo and visionary.” Now in her latest work, From Green to Red, she is tackling climate change. Beatie tells Chi Chi Izundu how she created the work which is part music video, part protest piece using 800,000 years of historic NASA data.

This week sees the opening of the Serpentine Pavilion, one of the world’s most prestigious architecture commissions. The creative mind behind the 2021 design is South African architect Sumayya Vally. Sumayya speaks to Chi Chi about how her upbringing in apartheid South Africa influenced her community-focused vision of urban design.

A new exhibition on borders has opened in Belfast from the Turner Prize-nominated artist Willie Doherty. The exhibition is called Where and it features video, imagery and text to explore issues of division at borders around the world including Northern Ireland and the United States and Mexico border. Chi Chi Izundu talks to Willie about the exhibition and why he hopes it will challenge assumptions and thinking.

Plus French shoe designer to the stars, Christian Louboutin, talks about how his childhood visits to one of the most notable Parisian museums sparked his creativity and may well have helped launch his career.

Presented by Chi Chi Izundu

(Photo: Beatie Wolfe. Credit: Ross Harris)

[beatiewolfe]

Birdy Magazine interviews Beatie Wolfe

BEATIE WOLFE : Interview By Krysti Joméi

Check out the full article here (but don’t forget to buy a copy and support journalism if you can)… https://www.birdymagazine.com/featured/beatie-wolfe-interview-by-krysti-jomei/

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Design Milk feature multi-hyphenates Mark Mothersbaugh & Beatie Wolfe project

Mark Mothersbaugh + Beatie Wolfe Collect Postcards for Democracy To Save USPS

02.18.21

Posted by Caroline Williamson

VIEW PHOTO GALLERY

In 2020, the United States Postal Service (USPS) was thrown into the spotlight during the presidential election. The USPS, an independent agency of the federal government, has been cash-strapped for years and then it was hit by the COVID-19 pandemic which saw fewer people buying postage and products that keep it funded. Enter the Trump-elected Postmaster General, Louis DeJoy, who immediately began making cuts that have led to major slowdowns in mail delivery and substantial financial and legal ramifications. With a shared love of “tangible artforms,” multi-hyphenates Mark Mothersbaugh and Beatie Wolfe came together and organized a postcard art demonstration called Postcards for Democracy. The duo encouraged, and still welcomes, anyone and everyone to join the collective art piece while also helping to support the USPS by buying stamps. The project began last year but they’re continuing to accept postcards until August 8th, 2021.

A sampling of some of the postcards they’ve received so far…

VIEW PHOTO GALLERY

‘1-800-19-COVID’ by Charlotte Tarantolo

‘Public Service not Private Profit’ by Joan E. Bromley

‘VOTE’ by Unknown

‘Hazardous Waste’ by Christine Rotolo

‘Who can sleep?’ by Nanette

‘The World is Made of Many Colors’ by Gilbert Gragert

‘I hope we have a living ocean after 4 years’ by K.S. Bronowitz

‘Untitled’ by William Joseph Dunn

’Make Money, Sell Grit’ by Jon Hioki

‘Use Art’ by Martha Traer

Mark Mothersbaugh and Beatie Wolfe at Mutato \\\ Photo: Ross Harris

If you’re wondering what will become of the art-filled postcards, they’ll be on display at the Postcards for Democracy site-specific exhibition at the Bob Rauschenberg Gallery at FSW in Fort Meyers, Florida, from May 17th – August 8th, 2021. Any postcards that don’t arrive in time for the physical installation will be featured digitally via projectors at the exhibition.

Inspired to join the cause? Buy USPS stamps, make postcard art, and then mail it to:

Postcards for Democracy 8760 Sunset Blvd, West Hollywood, CA 90069-2206 USA

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Cynthia Erivo, Mark Mothersbaugh, Beatie Wolfe, Baratunde Thurston & More Join SXSW Online 2021

Cynthia Erivo, Mark Mothersbaugh, Beatie Wolfe, Baratunde Thurston & More Join SXSW Online 2021

Introducing the first programming announcement for SXSW Online 2021, an exclusive digital experience packed with powerful presentations from some of the world’s most inspired thinkers and diverse visionaries from the ever-evolving worlds of tech, film, music, and beyond.

“Spanning numerous industries, the Featured Speakers in today’s announcement strongly reflect the programming themes that will underscore our upcoming event,” said Hugh Forrest, Chief Programming Officer. “As always, SXSW brings together the world’s most important thought leaders to address society’s most important challenges.”

From creating postcards for democracy to combating climate change with aquaculture, the initial Conference lineup explores our 2021 Themes including A New Urgency – a look at how business, non-profit, government, science, and tech communities are tackling global crises and what advancements are needed to create immediate and lasting progress. Dive into programming across all seven themes with a stellar roster of Featured Sessions and Featured Speakers including Dominique Crenn, Cynthia Erivo, Cherie Hu, Wyclef Jean, David E. Kelley, Michael Lewis, Mark Mothersbaugh, Cat Packer, Nonny de la Peña, Maria Sharapova, Baratunde Thurston, Logan Ury, Amy Webb, Beatie Wolfe, Andrew Zimmern, and more.

Looking for your next creative collaborator? Ready to elevate your career to the next level? In need of some inspiration? For SXSW Online, we’re offering one pass that covers the entire event, allowing attendees to take in programming and connect with others across the many industries that SX serves. Register to attend SXSW Online 2021 from March 16-20 early to save!

Get to know the initial round of Featured Speakers and Featured Sessions below. Stay tuned for more big announcements in January including Conference Keynotes and Featured Speakers, sessions accepted from PanelPicker® speaking proposals, Film Festival screenings, Music Festival showcases, and more. SXSW Comedy Festival content will be announced as we get closer to the March event.

Featured Speakers

Amy Webb – Quantitative futurist, professor of strategic foresight at the NYU Stern School of Business and the Founder of the Future Today Institute, a leading foresight and strategy firm that helps leaders and their organizations prepare for complex futures. She is the best-selling, award-winning author of several books, including The Big Nine: how The Tech Titans And Their Thinking Machines Could Warp Humanity and The Signals Are Talking: Why Today’s Fringe Is Tomorrow’s Mainstream. She serves as a technical, script and creative consultant for films and shows set in the future. All of her futures research, frameworks, and tools are open source and made freely available to the public.

Angela Benton – Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Streamlytics, a next generation data intelligence ecosystem which helps everyday people and companies ethically access consumer data streams. Prior to her role at Streamlytics, Angela Benton founded the first accelerator for minorities globally in 2011, NewME was acquired in December 2018. Benton has been featured on Goldman Sachs’ 100 Most Intriguing Entrepreneurs; Fast Company’s Most Creative People in Business and their Most Influential Women In Technology; Business Insiders’ 25 Most Influential African-Americans in Technology, and many more.

Angela Roseboro – As Chief Diversity Officer for Riot Games, Angela Roseboro develops and implements initiatives to drive inclusion and cultural growth. Roseboro manages all activity relating to diversity and inclusion (D&I) while also leading the recruiting team in driving inclusivity in Riot’s hiring and talent sourcing processes. Prior to joining Riot, Roseboro was the Global Head of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion at Dropbox. Previously she provided human resource guidance to Fortune 500 companies including T. Rowe Price, Jones Lang LaSalle, Genworth Financial, Whirlpool Corporation, and Manpower International.

Ann Hiatt – During her 15 years as the Executive Business Partner for Jeff Bezos, Founder and CEO of Amazon, and Eric Schmidt, CEO/Executive Chairman of Google, Ann Hiatt received her initial business training and now consults with executives and companies across the globe to reverse engineer their moonshot goals. Hiatt is an international speaker and her first book, Bet On Yourself, will be published by HarperCollins in 2021.

Allison Murphy – In February 2019, Allison Murphy assumed the position of Senior Vice President, Ad Innovation at The New York Times Company. In this role, Murphy leads the development and delivery of The Times Company’s ad innovation strategy, directing cross-functional teams responsible for accelerating the Company’s development of market-leading ad platforms and products. She is also responsible for the Company’s advertising mission, a cross-functional team that spans product, tech and data to accelerate digital advertising.

Baratunde Thurston – Emmy-nominated host Baratunde Thurston has worked for The Onion, produced for The Daily Show, advised the Obama White House, and wrote the New York Times bestseller How To Be Black. He’s the executive producer and host of two podcasts: How To Citizen with Baratunde and We’re Having A Moment which CNET called “the most important podcast of 2020.” He’s also the creator and host of the weekly pandemic show, Live On Lockdown. In 2019, he delivered what MSNBC’s Brian Williams called “one of the greatest TED talks of all time”. Right now, the writer, activist, and comedian is using his powerful voice to help people understand this revolutionary moment with his unique blend of insight, humor, and empathy.

Benjamin Hubert – Award-winning British design entrepreneur Benjamin Hubert is the founder of the creative agency, LAYER. LAYER is focused on experience-driven design for both the physical and digital worlds. Led by Hubert and a growing creative team, LAYER is partnering with forward-thinking brands – including Nike, Google, Bang and Olufsen, Samsung, Braun, Fritz Hansen and Vitra – to create products that will help define the way we live, work and communicate in the future, from A.I. to smart wearables and furniture systems, to the next generation of media devices and mobile communication tools.

Bruce Mau – A brilliantly creative optimist, Bruce Mau’s love of thorny problems led him to create a methodology for whole-system change. A serial entrepreneur since the age of 9, he became an international figure with the publication of his landmark S,M,L,XL, co-authored with Rem Koolhaas. He is the author of Massive Change and MC24. He is cofounder and CEO of Massive Change Network and Bruce Mau Studio, based in Chicago, and Chief Design Officer for Freeman.

Bryony Cole – Since launching the top-rated podcast, Future of Sex, Cole has been on stages across the world, defining the direction of sextech for governments, technology and entertainment companies. In 2020, she launched Sextech School, the first and only program empowering entrepreneurs in the pursuit of breakthrough sexual innovations in technology.

Cathy O’Neil – Having earned a Ph.D. in math from Harvard and postdoc at the MIT math department, Cathy O’Neil was a professor at Barnard College where she published a number of research papers in arithmetic algebraic geometry. After switching over to the private sector for the hedge fund D.E. Shaw and RiskMetrics, she then left finance in 2011 to work as a data scientist in the New York start-up scene, building models that predicted people’s purchases and clicks. She wrote Doing Data Science in 2013 and launched the Lede Program in Data Journalism at Columbia in 2014. O’Neil is a regular contributor to Bloomberg View and author of Weapons of Math Destruction. She recently founded ORCAA, an algorithmic auditing company.

Cat Packer – Within her role as the first Executive Director and General Manager of the Department of Cannabis Regulation, Cat Packer leads the licensing and regulation of commercial cannabis activity within the City of Los Angeles and manages the implementation of the City’s cannabis related policies and programs. Packer previously served as California Policy Coordinator for the Drug Policy Alliance, where she worked to ensure the successful and equitable implementation of various cannabis policy reforms, as well as the Campaign Coordinator for Californians for Responsible Marijuana Reform, a social justice-centered campaign in support of the 2016 Adult Use of Marijuana Act.

Cherie Hu – Cherie Hu is the founder and publisher of Water & Music, a newsletter about music-industry innovation that reaches over 10,000 subscribers. She has written hundreds of articles on music, tech and finance for the likes of Billboard, Forbes, NPR Music, and Pitchfork. Hu currently teaches a course on music and gaming as an adjunct professor at NYU’s Clive Davis Institute of Recorded Music.

Dr. Michael Watkins – Michael Watkins is the Director of Jet Propulsion Lab (JPL), NASA’s lead center for robotic exploration of the solar system, including such legendary missions as Voyager, Cassini, and the Mars Curiosity rover, as well as the upcoming Mars Perseverance rover, Europa Clipper, and more. Watkins also serves as a Vice President of the California Institute of Technology, which staffs and manages JPL for NASA. He has led major science and engineering teams for JPL for 25 years.

Jim McKelvey – Cofounder of Square Jim McKelvey is a serial entrepreneur, glassblower, philanthropist, and Independent Director of the St. Louis Fed. McKelvey is also a master glass artist and author, having written the world’s most widely read text on the subject, The Art Of Fire. His industrial design work is part of the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art in NYC and The Smithsonian in Washington DC. His glass studio, Third Degree Glass Factory in St. Louis, is one of the main US hubs for the glassblowing arts. He is also the founder of LaunchCode, a nonprofit making it possible for anyone to learn programming and land a full-time job in under six months, for free. McKelvey’s newest venture, Invisibly, is working to give people control of their online identities.

Joost van Dreunen – An academic and entrepreneur with an expertise in video games, Joost van Dreunen teaches at the NYU Stern School of Business. Previously he was co-founder and CEO of SuperData Research, a games market research firm, which he sold to Nielsen in 2018. He is an advisor and investor, author of One Up, and and writes a weekly newsletter on gaming, tech, and entertainment called SuperJoost Playlist.

Logan Ury – Behavioral scientist turned dating coach Logan Ury is an internationally recognized expert on modern love. As the Director of Relationship Science at the dating app Hinge, Ury leads a research team dedicated to helping people find love. After studying psychology at Harvard, she ran Google’s behavioral science team—the Irrational Lab. She recently published her first book, How To Not Die Alone.

Michael Lewis – New York Times bestselling author Michael Lewis’ most recent works are The Fifth Risk, The Undoing Project, Flash Boys, and The Big Short. The Blind Side, published in 2006, tells the story of Michael Oher, a poor, illiterate African-American kid living on the streets of Memphis whose life is transformed after he is adopted by white Evangelical Christians. Before that he wrote Moneyball, a book ostensibly about baseball but also about the way markets value people. Both of his books about sports became movies, nominated for Academy Awards, as did his book about the 2008 financial crisis, The Big Short. His other works include Boomerang, The New New Thing, Coach, Losers, and Liar’s Poker.

Steve DeAngelo – A globally recognized cannabis leader, Steve DeAngelo was dubbed “the father of the legal industry” by former Speaker of the California Assembly Willie Brown. As a lifelong activist, author, educator, investor, and entrepreneur, he has spent more than four decades on the front lines of the cannabis reform movement. His most notable business achievements include cofounding Harborside, one of the first six dispensaries licensed in the US, a publicly-traded company on the Canadian Securities Exchange with five dispensary locations in California including one of the first to feature a drive-thru; Steep Hill Laboratory, the first cannabis analytics company; and Arcview Group, the first dedicated cannabis investment network.

Featured Sessions

AI and Great Power Competition – President Xi Jinping claims China will be the AI world leader by 2025. Russian President Vladimir Putin says whatever country leads in AI will be the ruler of the world. Google’s former Chairman Eric Schmidt warned there is a digital Berlin Wall being erected. The link between AI and great power competition will set the stage for the rest of this century. How will the private and public sector in western democracies work together to survive and thrive? More importantly, how can we create technologies that are authentic to our values? Join experts at the intersection of AI and national security who are on the frontlines of this fight – Lieutenant Colonel Alexander S. Vindman and CEO of Pryon Igor Jablokov. Gain insights on AI advancements and explore what role you can play in this challenge.

Aquaculture, Food Systems and Climate Change – Food is simply the biggest lever we have to combat climate change and improve the health and wellbeing of the planet’s growing population. Aquaculture, the farming of aquatic animals and plants, is vital as the planet’s fastest growing food production system. Seafood is one of the healthiest proteins to consume and one of the most efficient and sustainable to produce. Done well, aquaculture can be a powerful force for ecological and social good. The moderated panel of experts will discuss aquaculture’s key role. Join award-winning ocean activist Alexandra Cousteau; four-time James Beard Award-winning TV personality and chef Andrew Zimmern; multi award-winning writer and producer David E. Kelley; and organic seaweed farmer and entrepreneur Sarah Redmond to explore the context of the global climate crisis and aquaculture’s key role in transforming our food systems.

Can VR Create Real Change? – VR has gotten quite a reputation for creating impact. But does the hype really add up? We are at a pivotal moment in history, with socio-political division at an all-time high and less than a decade left to prevent climate crisis. Could creating virtual realities actually help move us towards a better tomorrow? Join AR/VR producer and director Fifer Garbesi; award-winning immersive artist and professor Gabo Arora; Director of EarthXR Tiffany Kieran; and founder of Emblematic Group Nonny de la Peña as they dig into the impacts of this medium, putting real change and direct action front and center.

Driving Action & Advocacy Through Online Community – Online communities are not new; but as the world has adapted to 2020, these digital spaces have proven their worth in a whole new way. Reddit has witnessed this first hand, as more people have joined its many thousands of communities for connection, distraction, and belonging in a time of unprecedented disconnection. While IRL experiences continue to evolve in unexpected ways, the communities on Reddit remain a constant source of conversation and companionship, as well as a valuable lens from which to examine human psychology, behavior, and sentiment. Join Reddit’s COO Jen Wong and CNN’s Kerry Flynn for a conversation about why online communities were made for this moment, their role in the digital ecosystem, and the value they bring to brands looking to build real connection, advocacy, and drive action.

How to Scale a Mission-Driven Brand – Join Supergoop! CEO and Founder Holly Thaggard and her early-stage investor, world-class tennis champion and entrepreneur Maria Sharapova, for an inspiring conversation sharing insights on how Thaggard scaled her company from a mission to end the skin cancer epidemic to a business with millions in revenue, all while innovating a category and changing consumer behavior. Hear from Sharapova first-hand about how she identified a promising investment opportunity in a young, but high-growth brand with an authentic mission as its north star, and advice for other emerging entrepreneurs prioritizing mission and doing good.

Inside GENIUS: ARETHA, the Story of the Queen of Soul – National Geographic’s GENIUS is an Emmy-winning anthology series that dramatizes the fascinating stories of the world’s most brilliant innovators, exploring their extraordinary achievements along with their volatile, passionate, and complex personal relationships. The third season will explore Aretha Franklin’s musical genius, incomparable career and the immeasurable impact and lasting influence she has had on music and culture around the world. She will be portrayed by Oscar-nominated Cynthia Erivo (Harriet, The Color Purple) and Emmy-winning Courtney B. Vance (The People v. O.J. Simpson: American Crime Story) will play Aretha’s father, C.L. Franklin. Our acclaimed panelists including GENIUS: ARETHA executive producer and director Anthony Hemingway; multi award-winning producer and author Brian Grazer, multi award-winning actress and singer Cynthia Erivo; Broadway and television costume designer Jennifer Bryan; and Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Suzan-Lori Parks will explore the craft and care that goes into honoring her legacy and bringing her story to life.

The New Marketplace of Music Royalties – The Music Modernization Act takes effect this year, mechanical streaming royalty rates are on the rise, and the newly formed MLC, along with BMI, ASCAP, SESAC, SoundExchange and others, is tracking music royalties using new technologies. These changes are empowering creatives and independent artists, especially in the wake of Covid-19. As music royalty rights grow in value, what do royalty holders need to know in order to maximize and leverage their royalty assets? This panel of global thought leaders will help royalty owners, managers and advisors make informed decisions regarding the potential value and versatility of royalty copyrights and licenses. Join Founder and CEO of Sound Royalties Alex Heiche; CMO of The Mechanical Licensing Collective Ellen Truley; entertainment lawyer Robert A. Celetsin, and Grammy award-winning musician and actor Wyclef Jean for a discussion on the democratization of the music industry is underway as the expansion of digital streaming transforms the landscape of music royalties.

Postcards for Democracy: A Collective Art Demo – Artistic visionaries DEVO cofounder Mark Mothersbaugh and self-proclaimed “musical weirdo” Beatie Wolfe share a love of tangible artforms, in and amongst their futuristic explorations. In light of the threat to our 225yr old postal service, at a time that could jeopardize the democracy of the country, Mothersbaugh and Wolfe joined forces for this collective postcard art demonstration. The aim of this campaign is to encourage as many people as possible to support USPS (if we don’t use it we’ll lose it!), our right to vote, and democracy as a whole via the power of art.

What is Taste? – Without taste, the experience of eating would be a routine and joyless chore. Taste is an almost magical part of our individual experience because everyone’s perceptions and preferences are so unique; but what IS taste, really, and what informs it? It is so much more than a chemical reaction on our taste buds. Taste is made up of shifting cultural norms, food science and technology, and the art of cooking, of bringing a dish to life through careful preparation and the right ingredients. And by better understanding how all of these elements work together, you can develop an even deeper appreciation for your favorite food experiences. Cofounder of So Vegan Ben Pook, three-Michelin-starred chef Dominique Crenn, CEO of Motif FoodWorks Jonathan McIntyre, Ph.D, author and scientist of senses and emotion Rachel Herz, Ph.D. will discuss how culture, science, and technology shape one of the most important aspects of our lives.

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Inequalities: Art Activist Liezel Strauss

Inequalities: Art Activist Liezel Strauss

Beatie Wolfe w/ Liezel Strauss - Orange Juice for the Ears

Friday 24 July 2020

Ep.22 Inequalities: Beatie Wolfe interviews Art Girl Rising and Subject Matter founder Liezel Strauss about her work which addresses the widespread under-representation of women artists throughout the art world and her vision for creating fair representation while also empowering artists and making art accessible. Listen to this show that kicks off with Beatie and Liezel reflecting on how they first met when the UN Women invited them both to be 1 of 9 innovation role models for its ‘Impossible to Ignore’ global media campaign. 

Orange Juice for the Ears with “musical weirdo and visionary” (Vice) Beatie Wolfe [[www.beatiewolfe.com]] explores the power of music across Space, Science, Art, Health, Film & Technology by talking to the leading luminaries in each field from Nobel Prize winners to multi-platinum producers and hearing the music that has most impacted them, their “Orange Juice for the Ears”. Beatie Wolfe is an artist who has beamed her music into space, been appointed a UN Women role model for innovation, and held an acclaimed solo exhibition at the V&A Museum.

Liezel Strauss’ Orange Juice for the Ears

First song that imprinted? “I’m Walking” by Fats Domino 

First album that shaped who you are? “Just What I Needed” by The Cars - from album same name

The music you would send into Space? “Little Moth” by Beatie Wolfe

The song you would have at your memorial? “Human” by The Killers 

The album you would pass onto the next generation? “Beautiful Baby” by William Onyeabor - from Atomic Bomb

This episode of Orange Juice for the Ears first aired live on LA’s dublab radio but is also available as a podcast. This show was Mastered by Dean Hovey. For rights reasons, the music in this podcast version is shorter than in the original broadcast.

[beatiewolfe]

Balls: Rock Star & Actress Suzi Quatro

Ep.21 Balls: Beatie Wolfe interviews 'first lady of rock 'n roll' Suzi Quatro about breaking down barriers and rewriting the rules for women in a male-dominated rock culture. Listen to this show that takes you from Elvis to Leather Tuscadero via the power of limitless swagger.

“Women have balls! They keep them in their heads so they don’t get kicked.” - Suzi Quatro

Orange Juice for the Ears with “musical weirdo and visionary” (Vice) Beatie Wolfe explores the power of music across Space, Science, Art, Health, Film & Technology by talking to the leading luminaries in each field from Nobel Prize winners to multi-platinum producers and hearing the music that has most impacted them, their “Orange Juice for the Ears”. Beatie Wolfe is an artist who has beamed her music into space, been appointed a UN Women role model for innovation and held an acclaimed solo exhibition at the V&A Museum.

Suzi Quatro’s Orange Juice for the Ears

* First song that imprinted? “Don’t be Cruel” by Elvis Presley * First album that shaped who you are? (plus which song to play) "Stuck Inside of Mobile (with the Memphis Blues Again)" by Bob Dylan - from Blonde on Blonde * The music you would send into Space? “Pathetique” by Beethoven * Song you would have at your memorial? “When I Fall in Love” by Nat King Cole * Album you would pass onto your kids? (plus which song to play) “Rosie” by Jackson Browne - from Running on Empty

The show opens with “Can the Can” by Suzi Quatro.

This episode of Orange Juice for the Ears first aired live on LA’s dublab radio but is also available as a podcast. This show was Mastered by Dean Hovey

[beatiewolfe]

Identity: Artist & Activist Gregg Deal

Beatie Wolfe w/ Gregg Deal - Orange Juice for the Ears

Friday 22 May 2019

Ep.20 Identity: Beatie Wolfe interviews artist and activist Gregg Deal whose work deals with indigenous identity and pop culture, touching on issues of race relations, historical consideration and stereotype. Listen to this show that takes you from the roots of punk rock to performance art like “The Last American Indian on Earth” via the thread of disrupting spaces. 

Orange Juice for the Ears with “musical weirdo and visionary” (Vice) Beatie Wolfe [[www.beatiewolfe.com]] explores the power of music across Space, Science, Art, Health, Film & Technology by talking to the leading luminaries in each field from Nobel Prize winners to multi-platinum producers and hearing the music that has most impacted them, their “Orange Juice for the Ears”. Beatie Wolfe is an artist who has beamed her music into space, been appointed a UN Women role model for innovation and held an acclaimed solo exhibition at the V&A Museum.

Gregg Deal’s Orange Juice for the Ears

First song that imprinted? “Ohio” by Crosby, Still, Nash and Young

First album that shaped who you are? (plus which song to play) - “Low Self Opinion” by Rollins Band - from End of Silence

The music you would send into Space? “Sex and Violence” by the Exploited

Song you would have at your memorial? “Hurt” by Johnny Cash

Album you would pass onto your kids? (plus which song to play) “Waiting Room” by Fugazi - from 13 Songs

The show first aired live on LA’s dublab radio but is also available as a podcast. This podcast was Mastered by Dean Hovey. For rights reasons the music in this podcast version is shorter than in the original broadcast.

Photo by Daniella Zalcman

[beatiewolfe]

Film | Orange Juice for the Ears | Virtual Design Festival | Dezeen

VDF premieres Beatie Wolfe's documentary Orange Juice for the Ears

Marcus Fairs | 9 hours ago  Leave a comment

To kick off today's VDF collaboration with Beatie Wolfe, we're exclusively streaming the online premiere of the singer-songwriter's documentary Orange Juice for the Ears: from Space Beams to Anti-Streams.

The documentary, which has never been streamed online before, will be available free to Dezeen readers for the duration of Virtual Design Festival.

The film premiere will be followed at 1:00pm by an exclusive preview of Wolfe's forthcoming environmental protest piece Red to Green, and an essay by Wolfe in which she explores the power of music to improve the human mind and ease the suffering of people with dementia.

At 5:00pm UK time Wolfe will conduct a live interview with Dezeen founder Marcus Fairs, followed by an exclusive performance of her music.

Wolfe "pioneers new formats for music"

Commissioned by the Barbican Centre last year, the 30-minute Orange Juice for the Ears documentary explores the work of Wolfe, a singer-songwriter based in Los Angeles.

The Barbican Centre described Wolfe as "a singer-songwriter of raw acoustic indie channelling Leonard Cohen and Elliott Smith, Wolfe also pioneers new formats for music."

Beatie Wolfe is a singer-songwriter based in Los Angeles

Directed, shot and edited by Ross Harris, the film premiered at the Barbican Centre in London in October 2019, followed by an industry screening in Los Angeles. The film was commissioned as part of Barbican Centre's Life Rewired season, which explored how artists are responding to rapid technological change.

"With the season investigating the impact of the pace and extent of technological change in our culture and society, and looking at how we can grasp and respond to the seismic shifts these advances will bring about, there are few artists who exemplify this exploration as much as Beatie Wolfe," Barbican Centre said.

Music "can lift us out of depression"

The film's title comes from a quote by the late neurologist Oliver Sacks, who explored the relationship between music and the human mind.

"Music can lift us out of depression or move us to tears — it is a remedy, a tonic, orange juice for the ear," Sacks wrote in his book Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain.

Virtual Design Festival is hosting an exclusive stream of Wolfe's documentary Orange Juice for the Ears

"But for many of my neurological patients, music is even more – it can provide access, even when no medication can, to movement, to speech, to life. For them, music is not a luxury, but a necessity.”

Born in London, Wolfe has pioneered new ways of combining music with design and technology. She released her debut EP, Burst, as an iPhone app in 2010, making her one of the first artists to explore the potential of apps as a format for musicians.

Pioneer of new musical formats

In 2013, her debut album 8ight was released on vinyl, in book form and as the "world's First 3D interactive album app".

Her second album, Montagu Square, was recorded live at 34 Montagu Square in London, which was at various times the home of Jimi Hendrix, Paul McCartney, Ringo Starr, John Lennon and Yoko Ono.

Raw Space was issued as a set of NFC-enabled business cards

Recorded in the room where The Wind Cries Mary and Eleanor Rigby were written, the album was accompanied by a "musical jacket" created by fashion designer Michael Fish, who dressed rocks stars including Hendrix, David Bowie and Mick Jagger.

Intended as a way of recapturing the lost emotional connection listeners used to have with vinyl album sleeves, the tailored jacket contained near-field communication (NFC) chips that allow tracks from the album to be played when a smartphone is held up to the garment.

Album recorded in "world's quietest room"

The Montagu Square album includes the track Take Me Home, an instrumental version of which was used as the soundtrack for the Virtual Design Festival launch movie.

Wolfe's 2017 album Raw Space was recorded in Bell Labs' anechoic chamber, a room described as "the quietest room in the world".

Related story

Lockdown is an "exercise in presence and gratitude" says Beatie Wolfe

The album was released as the "world's first live 360 AR stream". The album later became the first to be broadcast into space via the Holmdel Horn Antenna.

The Raw Space album was later issued as a set of NFC-enabled business cards, each of which was designed by a different graphic designer.

Solo exhibition at V&A

In 2018, London's V&A museum hosted a solo exhibition of Wolfe's work titled The Art of Music in the Digital Age: a series of world-first designs.

"Beatie Wolfe presents a series of album innovations that explore how technology can be used to recapture a sense of storytelling, ceremony and tangibility for music in the digital age," wrote the V&A about the show, held as part of London Design Festival 2018.

The documentary artwork is by Kizzy Memani of ArtCenter College of Design.

About Virtual Design Festival

Virtual Design Festival runs from 15 April to 30 June 2020. It intends to bring the architecture and design world together to celebrate the culture and commerce of our industry, and explore how it can adapt and respond to extraordinary circumstances

[beatiewolfe]

Live | Interview & Performance | Virtual Design Festival | Dezeen

Live interview followed by exclusive performance by singer-songwriter Beatie Wolfe

Marcus Fairs 

As the final part of today's VDF x Beatie Wolfe collaboration, the musician speaks live to Dezeen founder Marcus Fairs before performing three of her tracks.

In a specially pre-recorded performance from her Los Angeles home studio, Wolfe performs three of her tracks: As You, What I Feel Inside and Oh My Heart.

The performance concludes the day-long collaboration with Wolfe that also featured the online premiere of the Orange Juice for the Ears documentary about her work, an exclusive preview of her upcoming From Green to Red installation, and an essay about the power of music to help people through difficult times.

About Virtual Design Festival

Virtual Design Festival runs from 15 April to 30 June 2020. It intends to bring the architecture and design world together to celebrate the culture and commerce of our industry, and explore how it can adapt and respond to extraordinary circumstances.

[beatiewolfe]

"Music is core to our humanity" writes Beatie Wolfe in an essay exploring tangible formats for music in the digital age

Marcus Fairs

For her collaboration with VDF, singer-songwriter Beatie Wolfe has written an essay about the power of music to transform lives, particularly during difficult times.

Titled The Art of Imprinting in the Digital Age, the essay explores the notion of how to make music more tangible at a time when it has become a digital commodity, as well as discussing the importance of storytelling and ceremony in music.

The Art of Imprinting in the Digital Age

Hi, I'm Beatie Wolfe, an artist and innovator and I create new tangible formats for albums in the digital age. I'm also co-founder of a research project looking at the power of music as medicine.

I first met Dezeen's founder Marcus Fairs during a BBC radio interview where he was ill and I had vertigo, and at that time I was about to open a solo exhibition of my world-first album designs at the Victoria & Albert Museum, which was a great life highlight and a huge honour.

So I wanted to share some of my thoughts on the subject of the power of music and art to us all. Perhaps especially in light of these times.

Opening story

I've always loved the stories of albums, the tangibility of records and the ceremony of listening. From the time I started writing songs aged eight and discovered my parents' vinyl collection, I saw records as musical books, with the artwork providing the perfect backdrop for the music, and I loved opening them up and entering into the world of the album. There was also a ritual to the occasion.

Wolfe started writing songs aged eight

From that age I started imagining what my album could look like, what it could feel like, what worlds I could create. When it was time for my first album to be released, it was a very different era with the digital replacing the physical. So I thought about how to connect the two and that's what my work became centred around. Reimagining the vinyl experience but for today.

Art is core to our humanity

Why was this so important to me? Because music IS core to our humanity. We are a musical species more than anything else and music imprints on the brain deeper than any other human experience.

I believe that there are three things that allow something to go deep, to stay with us and forever change us. These are tangibility, storytelling and ceremony.

Related story

VDF premieres Beatie Wolfe's documentary Orange Juice for the Ears

Tangibility as in a physical art form or space to explore. This could be a record jacket or the world's quietest room. Anything that grounds us in our present reality through a physical touchpoint.

Storytelling in the broadest sense of the word, the ability for the artist or creator to tell a story through their work that can engage the imagination and transport us.

And lastly but perhaps most importantly: Ceremony, the space around and within the experience that allows us to go deep, to be fully immersed.

I believe that these three things set the stage for the music and allow it to imprint. Imprint so that every one of these experiences becomes a part of who we are and what we carry with us. This doesn't just apply to music but to everything and anything that helps to reconnect us with ourselves and one another. It's these experiences that keep us alive inside.

What threatens these values today?

Tangibility, storytelling and ceremony had always been part of the physical music listening experience and were just some of the things we lost when we moved to digital.

The digital era created access, it presented solutions but it also created an idea that we could fast track a lot of what defined us as humans to begin with and without the true cost or value reflected in the process.

Music has become part of a constant background chatter, argues Wolfe

Music now floats around in its intangible sphere along with everything else that sits there: news notifications, calendar alerts, social media. Everything occupying this same superficial stream of information that infiltrates our day-to-day lives, bombarding our sensory systems until we are numb, overloaded and fatigued. Music, and art, have become part of that constant background chatter and we have forgotten why they are so much more.

There is a fine balance between what needs to be innovated and what needs to be preserved. So how do we reconcile the value of music and art today with an industry that has decided that albums are obsolete and singles need not be more than jingles; forgotten as easily as they are created? The opposite of imprinting.

Looking to neurology

I found part of my answer in neurology. The great late Oliver Sacks studied the power of music extensively and grounded what a lot of us feel intuitively about music, in science. In Musicophilia, his book about music and the brain, Sacks documents the impact of music for every neurological condition from Parkinson's to Alzheimer's, autism to schizophrenia, showing how music is a remedy, a tonic, an orange juice for the ears.

And I realised that there was no greater application of music than this: using music to reconnect us with ourselves and one another when nothing else could.

A seed was planted in the back of my mind and when I found out that my grandmother had been diagnosed with dementia I decided to take my guitar with me the next time I visited her and play her some songs… because why not?

Orange juice for the ears

Watching my grandmother transform from agitated and confused to joyful and at ease with just a song moved me so deeply. Then I decided to play to my father-in-law at his care home in Portugal and when the home director asked if I wouldn't mind playing to everyone in the ward with dementia and Alzheimer's, of course, I agreed. Realising that my songs would be unfamiliar to the residents and that no one in the home spoke any English (except for my relative) I was expecting a nice ambience at best.

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However, as I played and saw people waking up, clapping along, even dancing in their chairs and becoming visibly reanimated from the music, just as Sacks had described, I realised that something much more important was happening.

And then the director informed me in the 10 years he had been there it was the best he had seen the group.

Something was crystalizing into view. What if music's power was so strong, so interlinked with our own sense of self and wellbeing, that with even the memory component removed it could be a tonic, a remedy, a "way in". What if it was the music and not the memory making the magic? In Musicophilia, Sacks had theorized that "music does not have to be familiar to exert its emotional pull" but he had not tested this. I had seen the tip of precisely this and wanted to see how much deeper it went.

The research and charity

Inspired by this insight, back in the UK I began the Power of Music and Dementia research project with the Utley Foundation in 2014 with the intention of recreating what had happened naturally in Portugal but this time with the right controls in place and the caregivers and doctors monitoring the residents. I went into care homes all across the UK and performed an original set of my songs while the residents were monitored both during the live performance and the weeks following as they listened to the same songs on headsets.

The results were amazing. Both memory and communication were improved during the duration of the project and I witnessed some of the most profound reactions to music I have ever seen. Reactions that imprinted on me forever.

I watched David transform from a catatonic-like state to dancing. And Anne, who had not spoken a word in seven months, halfway through the performance broke into song. Every one of these breakthroughs felt like the most vital link in the chain of our understanding about what moves us, what restores us, what makes us uniquely human.

Wolfe is an ambassador for charity MusicforDementia2020

What began as a small research study in the UK was suddenly getting global attention and I found myself sitting with the world's top neurologists and researchers as they picked my brain on the subject. And all because I asked a question; not as a doctor, but as a musician.

Today music for dementia is becoming a global movement. The charity, MusicForDementia2020, (established out of my project) is now actively working to get music in all care homes in the UK by the end of this year and I continue to work with them as an ambassador.

Keeping alive inside

So what did this teach me? It taught me to celebrate the experiences that keep us alive inside, that remind us of why we are here in the first place. At a time of more access than ever, how can we retain a sense of value? How can we choose to carve out deeper, more ceremonial, moments in amongst the noise? How can we protect those endangered experiences that become our touchpoints, that shape our emotional sensibility, our identity, our wellbeing and create vast canyons and reserves in our very being?

We realise the importance of these choices when we realise the intrinsic value of music, and art, to us all as sentient beings. When you have witnessed the power of music as medicine in this pure and concentrated way, which cannot be staged or fabricated. It either works or it doesn't. When you see what music can do, when even language and memory are removed from the folds; see how the first few notes evokes a smile, a hand twitch, instantly, effortlessly, and this builds and grows and it's just them and the music. No tangible memories, no time and place. Just them and the music.

And suddenly the brain opens up like a flower, gently unfurling, presenting new pathways you never believed were there… until you realise that music is a necessity for those living with dementia because music is a necessity for every one of us.