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.”
For the Connected Earth, the artwork was deconstructed and adapted to fit the façade of the Ars Electronica Centre, with the coding support of Ars Electronica Futurelab’s Peter Holzkorn. The 800,000 years of historic CO2 data was converted into a wraparound bar chart, running down to CE 1 through the North and West façades, before the last 15 years counting down across the East façade, to convey the data in a digestible fashion while impressively illuminating the museum and reflecting across the Danube.
Credits: Beatie Wolfe, Ars Electronica Futurelab