Virtual Design Festival

From Green to Red is "part music video, part protest song and entirely a statement of our time" says Beatie Wolfe

As part of the VDF collaboration with Beatie Wolfe, the singer-songwriter has shared this exclusive preview of From Green to Red, a forthcoming interactive environmental protest installation.

Created for this year's London Design Biennale, the project sets to music NASA data showing how atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide have increased over the past 800,000 years.

From Green To Red by Beatie Wolfe
From Green to Red is an interactive environmental protest installation by singer-songwriter Beatie Wolfe

For VDF, Wolfe has prepared a special movie preview of the installation. This features a digital timeline that visualises the dramatic increase in CO2 in the atmosphere over the preceding 8,000 centuries, "reimagining both the music-video format and protest song," according to Wolfe.

"A statement of our time"

"It's part music video, part protest song and entirely a statement of our time," said Wolfe.

The title of the project comes from Wolfe's track From Green To Red, which explores climate-change denial and which Wolfe wrote after seeing the 2006 climate-change documentary An Inconvenient Truth.

"We don’t want to hear that the problem is us," Wolfe sings in the track. "So we live like we want in our own universe."

From Green To Red has been produced in collaboration with visual-effects studio The Mill and will premiere at the 2020 London Design Biennale, which is due to take place at Somerset House in London from 8 to 27 September 2020 and is directed this year by theatre designer Es Devlin.

Interactive installation will give visitors "a sense of agency"

"For the fully immersive From Green To Red experience, people will be able to interact with the piece in real-time via its motion sensors," Wolfe said. "As people approach the installation, both the music and timeline visualisation will respond, becoming clearer and sharper and revealing new factors and elements, allowing people to play with and explore the data."

"This has the effect of giving each individual a sense of agency about their own impact on the environment."

From Green To Red by Beatie Wolfe
The project sets to music NASA data visualising how atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide have increased over the past 800,000 years

The From Green To Red preview is part of a day-long VDF collaboration with Los Angeles-based Wolfe, who has been described as  "a singer-songwriter of raw acoustic indie channelling Leonard Cohen and Elliott Smith" who "pioneers new formats for music."

The collaboration includes the online premiere of the Orange Juice for the Ears: from Space Beams to Anti-Streams documentary about Wolfe's work and a live interview and performance.

About Virtual Design Festival

Virtual Design Festival runs from 15 April to 30 June 2020. The world's first online design festival will 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.

To find out what's coming up at VDF, check out the schedule. For more information or to join the mailing list, email [email protected].