V&A Museum invites musician and technology innovator Beatie Wolfe to exhibit her series of album innovations. This display explores what design for music can mean in the digital age – from a musical jacket woven with Wolfe's music to the world’s first "anti-stream" from the quietest room on Earth
Exhibition Overview
“Musical Weirdo and Visionary” (VICE) 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. Bridging the physical and digital and reimagining the vinyl experience in retro-future ways, these designs 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 world’s quietest room and a Space beam from the Big Bang Horn.
Wolfe’s latest design is the Raw Space Chamber, which will allow visitors to enter an anechoic chamber and immerse themselves in a ceremonial listening experience, while live AR animations bring the album’s artwork and lyrics to life in real- time. Come hear the sound of silence, a blast from the past, and the music launched into deepest space.
“I love the stories of albums, the tangibility of records and the ceremony of listening. From the time I started writing songs (age 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. 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. I saw technology as a way of reimagining the vinyl experience, while also making it magical for today’s generation.” – Beatie Wolfe
Part of London Design Festival at the V&A