From Green to Red, from art rebel Beatie Wolfe, is a stirring environmental protest piece about human impact on the planet, built using 800,000 years of NASA’s historic CO2 data. Taken from the title of a song Wolfe wrote in 2006 after seeing An Inconvenient Truth, this award-winning project has been presented at the Nobel Prize Summit, MIT, the London Design Biennale and COP26 (as the largest art statement of the conference).
From Green to Red takes the audience on a journey through our planet’s timeline, and specifically human impact, offering a powerful and dynamic visualization of 800,000 years of rising CO2 levels. Beatie Wolfe’s innovation translates intangible data, and a vast timeline often beyond our capacity to consider, into something that everyone can access and feel in the length of a song. “This piece is about re-presenting data in a way that people can literally see differently, using the power of art and music to make it evocative and relatable,” Wolfe says, “so that people can really get a sense of where we are right now.”
On the occasion of the Ars Electronica Festival 2024, the artwork was adapted by the Ars Electronica Futurelab for the façade of the Ars Electronica Centre. The historical CO2 data collected by NASA was converted into colours to impressively illuminate the façade.
Credits: Beatie Wolfe, Ars Electronica Futurelab