Barbican Center, London, UK - Documentary Premier

2019 OCT: Barbican Center, London, UK

Documentary / Beatie Wolfe

‘Orange Juice for the Ears: from Space Beams to Anti-Streams’ is a Barbican-commissioned documentary about Beatie Wolfe’s work directed by LA director Ross Harris. The film premiered at the Barbican Centre before being hosted by Dezeen where it was the most-watched video of the festival.

www.barbican.org.uk/whats-on/2019/event/beatie-wolfe-orange-juice-for-the-ears

VDF's top 10 videos include Chris Precht, Alison Brooks & Beatie Wolfe

We're roughly one-third of the way through Virtual Design Festival, having completed 24 days of the 77-day marathon! With the VDF team taking a break today as its a holiday in the UK, here are the ten most popular VDF video posts so far.

VDF movies, including live interviews, performances and documentaries, have been streamed over 400,000 times since the launch of the festival last month.

The list below reflects the current top 10, which naturally favours content that has been online the longest. More recent videos will inevitably overtake these in time!

1. VDF launch video

We opened VDF on 15 April with a movie featuring messages from 35 creatives around the world and featuring an opening sequence filmed at Bar Basso in Milan. The video has had over 25,000 views so far.

2. SO-IL Currents documentary

This documentary about the work of architect SO-IL was premiered on VDF as part of our collaboration with Lisbon's MAAT museum. So far the video has been played just over 25,000 times, putting it just a few views behind the launch movie.

3. Studio Drift's Franchise Freedom drone performance

We live streamed this secret Studio Drift performance featuring 300 choreographed drones flying over Rotterdam to celebrate Freedom Day in the Netherlands. The film has been streamed over 23,000 times in just three days.

4. Orange Juice for the Ears

VDF hosted the online premiere of this documentary about Beatie Wolfe, streamed as part of our collaboration with the musician that also featured a live interview and performance. The film has been played over 20,000 times.

5. Chris Precht screentime interview

Our Screentime series of live interviews has proven incredibly popular, with an average of 12,000 watching each in real-time on Dezeen or via our Facebook and YouTube channels. The interview with architect Chris Precht, which kicked off our series of interviews with architects sponsored by Enscape, has been viewed just over 20,000 times, making it the most popular of the series so far.

6. SO-IL Screentime interview

It's SO-IL again! Our live interview with Jing Liu and Florian Idenburg of the New York architecture studio has had over 15,000 views.

7. Zoomed In film screenings

Our collaboration with architecture image festival Zoomed in included a live discussion with architectural photographers Dennis Gilbert and Jim Stephenson, who screened films from their archives. The live stream attracted over 14,000 viewers.

8. Alison Brooks Screentime interview

Our live interview with architect Alison Brooks has been seen over 13,000 times and is still racking up plenty of views.

9. Beatie Wolfe live interview and performance

Our first-ever live musical performance was a big success, with over 13,000 people watching Beatie Wolfe discuss her work and perform three tracks.

10. Earth Day symposium part 1

Our collaboration with The World Around in celebration of Earth Day has proven really popular, with this symposium featuring experience designer Nelly Ben Hayoun, architect Kunlé Adeyemi and philosopher Timothy Morton attracting over 12,000 views so far.

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."

Photo by Ross Harris

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.

Photo by Ross Harris

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

Birdy Magazine's ARTOPSY with Beatie Wolfe

Couldn’t be more of a fan of Birdy magazine and what they’ve created and are continuing to do in the world of tangible, artful curation. Very honored to be in this month’s issue as their Artopsy in-depth piece by Krysti Jomei

Click here (+) to order your own hard copy

SXSW announce "From Green to Red" session

“From Green to Red” (taken from the title of a song Wolfe wrote in 2006 after seeing ‘An Inconvenient Truth') is a environmental protest piece about human impact on the planet, built using 800,000 of historic data in collaboration with The Mill // more (+)

BBC Radio 4 interview Beatie Wolfe

Beatie at the Barbican

Singer-songwriter and innovator Beatie Wolfe is showing a “teaser” of her new work at London’s Barbican gallery alongside the launch of a film about her. This environmental protest piece distils 800,000 years of historic data of carbon dioxide in the Earth’s atmosphere. It will become an interactive visualisation and soundtrack using gaming software.

CLOT Magazine interview Beatie Wolfe

BEATIE WOLFE, beaming music into space

Many contemporary artists have a hand in a range of disciplines which broadens their remit beyond their core set of influences and intentions, and for musicians, the performance space has responded by sprouting parallel environments for work to exist. The gallery is just as viable as the concert hall and for some might have even supplanted it in the investigation and encouragement of new artistic processes, and the presentation of their results.

With the social and conceptual entropy that is melting previously solid categories, artists are experimenting with new forms, traversing contrasts and collaborative strategies. In past decades such curiosity was often confined to a smaller assemblage of intrepid individuals and institutions.

Linking these worlds is Beatie Wolfe, a singer-songwriter originally, but one who early on in her career sought expansion beyond her immediate world, recently resulting in a solo exhibition of her album designs at the Victoria & Albert Museum and a new documentary on her work commissioned by the Barbican, titled Orange Juice for the Ears (dir. by Ross Harris). The London based Anglo-American was among the first artists to produce a release in the form of a phone app with 2010’s Burst EP. Interestingly, the launch event could not have been any more conflicting, bravely hanging onto historic musical tradition by taking place in a church.

Her subsequent innovations have seen her become a collaborator and point of interest for a wealth of tech-based companies and institutions. Surrounding the release of her debut album 8ight she found herself working with Apple on a series of events where album tracks were played alongside a presentation of her app. 

More recently she has utilised 360˚ VR technology to create a fully immersive experience of her Raw Space album, an ambitious vision realised within liaison with interactive creative team Design I/O and Nokia’s Bell Labs. The latter linkup renews the activities of Experiments in Art and Technology, a project initiated in the late 60s to pursue creative connections between artists and engineers. The figures involved in E.A.T. were responsible for many creative technological developments that the art world had never witnessed before, such as video projection and wireless sound transmission. It stands as an influential entity in numerous areas of sound and art including noise music, experimental visual art and performative concepts rooted in the Dada and Fluxus movements.

Through working with Wolfe, E.A.T. has in some sense revived itself in a landscape where its influence never left.

Interview by Daniel Mackenzie

In your view how has E.A.T. influenced experimental music and sound art since its inception? 

It created an umbrella under which experiments in sound, art, tech all came together and could co-exist in a nuanced yet expansive fashion. This helped to open up the field to broader, more interdisciplinary thinking. 

In what ways can the types of investigations carried out at E.A.T. be associated with the political, social and technological situation of the late 1960s? 

In the way of pushing things forward and being a forum for new ideas and ways of thinking. It was a time of true collective action and cultural upheaval with seismic shifts in music, politics, fashion, design, technology. The crossovers between politics and culture, and how those combined, created an era so enduring in the public psyche and I feel that it’s a really important time to remember that change can occur when different yet complementary forces unite, and when collective action and cultural upheaval come together. 

E.A.T. championed closer and more intimate working relationships between artists and engineers. Do you see this as an important working method to keep alive in today’s age of geographical separation made possible through remote communication and collaboration tools? 

Yes, virtual networks and remote communication tools provide great ways of starting unlikely or geographically challenging collaborations, but I think nothing beats being (physically) in the same room together. I really think that’s vital for key points and parts of the collaboration. 

Could you introduce your work and influences? Would you cite E.A.T. and the work stemming from its existence as influential in your own work? 

I am an artist/innovator and I create new formats for albums (and new ways of seeing music) that bridge the physical and digital and remind people of the magic of music, as both an art form and deeper experience, in this era of the intangible. I am influenced by people who are pushing things forward and people who contribute to this planet in some way. People who are thinking about the “long now”.

Jim Henson, Oliver Sacks, William Blake, Hafiz, Greta Thunberg, David Bowie, Nikola Tesla, Dr Sylvia Earle, Elliott Smith are just a few of my heroes. Those who began EAT were definitely working in the vein that I love; mixing media/fields, combining art, science and technology, and making people think differently and deeper about forms and ideas they thought they knew so well. Taking William Blake’s line as inspiration: “What is now proved was once only imagined,” I love those who imagine what can be, instead of work only with what is.

How has your work developed in alignment with advancements in technology? 

My work is about exploring how technology can be used to recapture storytelling, ceremony and tangibility for music (and art in the broader sense) in the digital age. Bridging the physical and digital and reimagining the vinyl experience in retro-future ways, these ‘world first’ designs (recently exhibited in a solo exhibition at the V&A Museum) range from a theatre in the palm of your hand, an album as a deck of cards and wearable record “jacket”, an ‘anti-stream’ from the quietest room on earth and a Space beam from the Big Bang Horn. 

In terms of where this comes from, I have been thinking about the worlds I could create for my albums since I was 8. I would spend hours immersed in my parents’ record collection. I saw records as musical books that I could open up and read like a story and through this physical gateway be transported into the world of the album. So I have used technology (perhaps contradictorily) to re-present a more tangible, ceremonial and deeper listening experience (the kind that imprinted on me as a kid) but in a way that also facilitates a sense of curiosity and makes people feel like they’re seeing music in a new light.

Technology, in my case, is just the magic dust that transforms a phone into an 80s viewfinder, an album cover into a musical jacket, a physical record stream into a Fantasia experience. It’s not about the technology but what it facilitates, for example, making the new feel nostalgic, and the familiar feel magical. And it’s also about being as inclusive as possible, so that everyone from a child to a grandparent intuitively knows how to interact with it. 

Also unlike the record industry it was never about coming up with one definitive format that could be sold or replicated with the intention of making money. It was always about the exploration and pushing the boundaries and having people see music in ways that captured their imaginations and reminded them of how an album is an art form (even today!) and one that I believe will never go out of fashion. 

Can you enlighten us to your involvement in the celebrations of E.A.T.’s 50th anniversary? 

For my latest record Raw Space I created an ‘anti-stream’ in collaboration with Bell Labs and Design I/O and this was celebrated for rebooting E.A.T. 50 years on. The E.A.T. program had attenuated over the decades, but after sharing my vision for Raw Space with Marcus Weldon (president of Bell Labs) this project kick-started E.A.T. for its next 50 years, which was both wonderful and cosmic for a number of reasons. The Raw Space ‘anti-stream’ was the world’s first live 360 AR experience, which combined live 360 stereoscopic video of my physical record stream from the quietest room on earth with real-time dynamic AR animations.

The effect was a Fantasia-like live-streamed album, which ran continuously for a week with artwork that evolved every time the record spun. It was an honour to follow in the footsteps of Warhol, Cage and Rauschenberg with Raw Space, especially as it was part art installation, part sound experience and a technological first on a number of levels.

It also led to Nobel Laureate Robert Wilson and me broadcasting Raw Space into Space via the Horn Antenna (used to prove the Big Bang theory) and this ended up serendipitously connecting me to Project Echo (the first phone call bounced via Space); my Grandfather and his work on the first series of U.S. Satellites (which I only discovered after giving a talk at JPL); and to Warhol who had asked Bell Labs to build him a series of Mylar balloons inspired by Project Echo. A much longer story but one of the most amazing examples of how everything is connected.

What is your chief enemy of creativity? 

Money can be, complacency definitely is, and I would also say tools for tool’s sake. I really find that you are your most creative when you’re out of your comfort zone, your senses are sharp and that often comes from being limited in some way whether that’s budget, access, or in the execution of your output. I always imagine it like a blank piece of paper. You have to start with a raw space and know exactly what to pull in and why. If you have all the money or all the options to begin with, it’s very hard to start with that same raw space.

You couldn’t live without…

Clean air, water, food… it sounds obvious but I think that in this current reality that is not something we should be taking for granted anymore. I’m working on a new environmental protest piece (“From Green to Red”) that explores human impact on the planet, built using 800,000 years of historic data. 

Film: The Barbican Documentary - Barbican commission film about Beatie Wolfe

2019: Film: The Barbican Documentary

Barbican commission new film about Beatie Wolfe’s music & approach

Europe's largest art centre, The Barbican, commissioned a documentary on pioneering musician Beatie Wolfe that will be premiered at the Barbican cinema before heading to the US. Titled “Beatie Wolfe: Orange Juice for the Ears - From Space Beams to Anti-Streams” this documentary is part of the Barbican's 'Life Rewired' a season exploring what it means to be human in the digital age. The film was directed by LA indie director Ross Harris (Elliott Smith, Beck).  

https://youtu.be/D8nBcvbvXv

Barbican Center, London, UK - Solo Exhibition

2019 OCT: Barbican Center, London, UK

Solo Exhibition / From Green to Red

Europe's largest cultural centre invited Beatie Wolfe to take over “The Life Rewired Hub” gallery to show the beta of her environmental protest art piece.

www.barbican.org.uk/whats-on/2019/event/from-green-to-red

DLD News profiles Beatie Wolfe

The Healing Power of Music

• August 20, 2019

• Karsten

• Innovation, Music

Alumni update: What’s new with Beatie Wolfe and her Music & Dementia project?

Try this: Type “music is…” into your favorite search engine and you’re probably seeing suggestions like “my life”, “my best friend” and “my savior”.

This illustrates how important music is to most of us. Listening to the right beat, a catchy melody or touching vocals can lift us up, provide comfort or give us the energy to make it to the finish line – in sports and at work.

British singer-songwriter Beatie Wolfe has been researching the healing powers of melodies for the mind in her Music & Dementia project. Inspired by neurologist Oliver Sacks and his book Musicophelia – Tales of Music and the Brain, Wolfe started giving private concerts to her grandmother who had been diagnosed with dementia.

“Afterwards I would get letters from the carers saying that she’d been so much better the days after the music”, Wolfe recalled at DLD Summer 2015 when she first presented the results of her own project. Supported by the Utley Foundation, a charitable trust, the singer had performed at nursing homes throughout the U.K. – showing that music could significantly benefit patients with Alzheimer’s and other forms of dementia.

Wolfe’s work sparked the interest of Stanford and Oxford universities as well as the American Alzheimer’s Association. It also resulted in the creation of a charity, Music For Dementia 2020, which aims to make music readily available for everyone living with dementia in Britain by next year.

“Seeing the incredible impact, I felt there was a responsibility to take the project further”, Wolfe says today. And while she’s busy pursuing new avenues as an artist, she remains committed to being a vocal ambassador for the advancement of music and dementia research. Her hope is to bring policymakers and health-care providers to pay more attention to the topic – far beyond the U.K. “I’m trying to spread the message and make this much more commonplace”, Wolfe says.

In her new, weekly radio show called Orange Juice for the Ears the 31-year-old singer is exploring the power of music on a more personal level. In each episode (also available as a podcast), Wolfe talks to her guests about songs and artists that have impacted them throughout their lives.

“Music is a universal connector”, Wolfe tells DLD. “It encompasses everything that is stimulating to us.”

Her guests have included Emmy-winning writer and producer Donick Cary (The Simpsons, Parks & Recreation, Silicon Valley), artist manager Janet Billig Rich and Nobel Laureate Dr. Robert Wilson. The astronomer previously collaborated with Wolfe on her Raw Spaceproject, helping her to beam her music into the vastness of the universe via the historic Bell Labs Holmdel Horn Antenna.

Wolfe is known for her love of experimentation. For her debut album she created an interactive app with 3D effects, lyrics and liner notes. NFC chips brought her second album to life: Wolfe designed a tailored suit – a literal album jacket – for her music, and listeners could tap their phones on the NFC chips woven into the fabric to play select songs. Most recently, Raw Space, her third album, was released as “the world’s first live 360° AR experience”.

While she’s busy exploring the creative possibilities of new technologies, there’s also a longing for the past in Wolfe’s experiments. “Growing up, I was completely obsessed with art and storytelling in any form”, she says. But as CDs gave way to downloads, and playlists on streaming services replaced the concept of albums she felt dismayed. “By the time I grew up a lot of what I loved was made irrelevant. The tangible had been replaced by digital.”

Wolfe’s answer has been to adopt technology to “figure out what could be the best of both worlds” because she’s eager to show that music deserves to be more than “a kind of background noise” – even if songs are permanently raining down from the Cloud these days, thanks to Spotify, YouTube, Deezer, Pandora and many other services.

“For me it’s about raising the bar”, Wolfe says. “Everything I’m doing is about reminding people how music can go beyond entertainment.”

A new documentary which chronicles her quest will debut in October. At the same time Wolfe is working on her newest project, a visualization of the CO2 concentration in the Earth’s atmosphere. “It’s part music video and part protest song”, she says. “And entirely interactive.” Stay tuned.

Orange Juice for the Ears

Here’s a sneak preview of the new documentary about Beatie Wolfe, directed by Ross Harris

Watch

Essentially Pop cover Barely Livings release

Singer-songwriter and artist Beatie Wolfe first came to our attention last year when she held her acclaimed solo-exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum. Always open to doing things that nobody else has tried before, Beatie has had her music beamed into space, and was appointed a UN role model for innovation. Beatie’s latest project is her new track, co-written and produced by multi-platinum selling producer, Linda Perry, and her empowering label, ‘We Are Hear‘, which she co-founded with Kerry Brown. ‘Barely Living’ is an Americana style song, and is out today April 12.

‘Barely Living’ was mixed by Billy Bush, of Garbage, and Muse, and mastered by Emily Lazar, who was the first female Grammy winner for mastering. Its release coincides with a trailer for a documentary on Beatie’s work, ‘Beatie Wolfe: Orange Juice For The Ears – From Space Beams To Anti-Streams‘, commissioned by the Barbican. Directed by LA indie videographer Ross Harris, who’s worked with and photographed Beck among others, the documentary includes new single ‘Barely Living’, and saw its premiere at SXSW this year. It will also feature at the LA Times Newstory Festival. It is part of the Barbican’s ‘Life Rewired’ series, a season exploring what it means to be a human, when technology is changing everything.

Beatie Wolfe was named by WIRED Magazine as one of “22 Folk Changing The World”, and leads the way when it comes to pioneering different formats for music, reuniting tangibility, storytelling, and ceremony with the album in this digital age.Wolfe has created a series of world’s-first designs that bridge the physical and digital, including: a 3D vinyl for the palm of your hand; an intelligent album deck of cards; a wearable record jacket – cut by the tailor who dressed Bowie and Hendrix out of fabric woven with Wolfe’s music – and most recently the world’s first live 360 AR stream from the quietest room on earth and a Space Beam via the Big Bang Horn.

Find out more about Beatie Wolfe and her music online on her official website, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, Apple Music, and Spotify.

Barbican newsletter highlights Beatie Wolfe

Discover the sounds of the city and beyond...

Reserve your seat… here (+)

LA Times music Editor Craig Marks with Beatie Wolfe, Linda Perry, Jason Flom & Craig Marks

Beatie Wolfe and Linda Perry premiere Barely Living at the LA Times

Beatie Wolfe was back at the LA Times' largest festival with We Are Hear's founders Linda Perry & Kerry Brown talking about their release together, joined by Lava Records CEO's Jason Flom and moderated by LA Times Music editor Craig Marks

Hear the new track ‘Barely Living’ here (+)

Read more about the Barbican documentary on Beatie Wolfe here (+)

and download/stream the new single Barely Living here (+)

Barbican Commission Film on Beatie Wolfe