HOPE #4: Which Lies is the Oil Industry telling Us? A Conversation with Beatie Wolfe

One of the key events on the annual Ars Electronica Festival is the presentation of the Golden Nicas of the Prix Ars Electronica, which will again be awarded to artists from all over the world. The main prize in the category ‘New Animation Art’ goes to the British conceptual artist, singer-songwriter and activist Beatie Wolfe for her video project ‘Smoke and Mirrors’. ‘Smoke and Mirrors’ is based on NASA's Blue Marble photo and visualises the increasing concentration of the greenhouse gas methane in the atmosphere with brown smoke emanating from the Earth's surface. At the same time, the video shows disinformation campaigns by large oil and gas companies since the 1970s. The topic of environmental protection and climate change has long been a recurring theme in Wolfe's interdisciplinary work. Her mission is to combine science and art, increase accessibility, make data and facts understandable and instil them with emotion. The United Nations appointed her as a role model for innovation in 2019. Her visualisation of 800,000 years of CO2 data was shown at the Nobel Prize Summit and the UN Climate Change Conference in Glasgow in 2021.

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