INTERVIEWS, REVIEWS & RELATED ARTICLES

Electronic Sound SEPTEMBER 2025 - by Mark Roland

CATCH OUR DRIFT

Brian Eno joins forces with conceptual artist Beatie Wolfe for a breathtaking trilogy of albums that float tantalisingly through opulent, ambient atmospherics and hushed Americanas. Their inaugural collaboration feels less like a meeting of minds, more like a shared hallucination - dreamy, intimate and spellbindingly deep. Get ready for total immersion

In his London studio, a white-walled and double-height space tucked away in a discreet mews in Notting Hill that serves as recording studio, art gallary and community hub, Brian Eno is showing off a pair of black, mushroom-shaped speakers. They ware made by Canon (the camera people) back in the early 1990s, when the company was briefly flexing its muscles in the audio game.

"I found tham in a skip in Kilburn!" enthuses Eno. "They're the most fabulous speakers!"

He's already waxed lyrical about and demonstrated another pair of speakers in his music studio. Those are fifty years old.

"They're so warm and Inviting - everything sounds really good, but they're probably not a groat idea if you're a proper engineer," he chuckles.

He has another, even older pair sitting in his Norfolk home, ha says, having bought them for £75 from a lady who had only ever listened to Radio 2, day and night, for about thirty years. Ha goes on to recount a story about Phil May of 1960s acid rockers The Pretty Things and how he would stack up his Vox AC30 amps in a studio, then feed a sine tone through them for months at a time in order to condition them.

"I think ha felt the cones improved with that much activity - well, these speakers have had a lot of activity," smiles Eno.

His enthusiasm for everything he's talking about is infectious, whether it's vintage speakers, his fantastic Eno archive playback tool - software that's designed by his friend and collaborator Peter Chilvers, which plucks scraps of ideas from his bulging hard drive of unfinished music and juxtaposes them to create new pieces (he lets it run while he's pottering about, and if he hears something interesting he can quickly output the results) - or the reason we're actually here, his new albums with Beatie Wolfe.

• • •

Despite a personal discography nearing a hundred albums and his production credits dwarfing that number, Brian Eno's appetite for making music appears entirely undiminished. Beatie Wolfe, his partner in these lush new sonic adventures, shares his enthusiasm, although she may need something of an introduction, occupying as she does a curious place in the pop art (or is that art pop?) firmament.

Wolfe's biography is filled with mind-bending projects in the sparsely populated and rarefied zone where art and science meet for drinks and get messy. Her creative journey is part rooted in her precocious pre-teens, writing songs aged nine with lyrics such as, "I died today and born in life / My mind is gone / I sit and dream / My brain is numb / A space for rent / A pink balloon / Flying on a witch's broom", as if it was entirely normal.

Her songwriting and singular voice saw her fronting a grunge band who were offered recording deals when she was still a young teenager. Watching friends get signed, then dropped or reshaped by the likes of Spice Girls svengali Simon Fuller, she eschewed all that and set out on her own idiosyncratic course.

This was, after all, a young person whose idea of fun included donning ninja outfits (she was also a teen black belt martial artist) with a friend in order to leap about London rooftops at night. Until she was caught and got into quite a lot of trouble.

Since then, Wolfe's projects have been eclectic, to say the least. She collaborated with Devo's Mark Mothersbaugh on Postcards For Democracy. Created a sonic self-portrait of her brain via old skool telephones and a "thinking cap" with data stored in tiny discs of glass. Commissioned a fancy jacket tailored by Mr Fish (the iconic British clothing brand who put Bowie in a dress in the early 1970s), which enabled people to download the album she recorded at 34 Montagu Square in London, where Jimi Hendrix lived and John and Yoko photographed themselves naked for the cover of Two Virgins. And she's even broadcast her music into space with Nobel Prize winner Dr Robert Wilson, using the historic Holmdel Horn Antenna.

She also always carries two pieces of space rock in her pocket, given to her by Dr Robert Wesson, a chief engineer at NASA. Here third album, 2017's Raw Space, saw her join the likes of John Cage and Painter Robert Rauschenberg as a collaborator with Bell Labs engineers and their anechoic chamber, part of the Experiments In Art And Technology project which began in 1966.

Question - what do you get when you cross the world's favourite ambient pioneer with a celebrated multimedia artist and a CV such aa that? Answer - a trilogy! Brian Eno and Beatie Wolfe clearly hit it off. As all Eno-adjacent trilogies go (Bowie/Berlin, various Moebius and Roedelius collabs, them three Talking Heads masterpieces), this one is notable for its speed of execution. Luminal in June, Lateral in July and the third one, Liminal. out in October. Bish, bash, bosh.

"We played toad-in-the-hole for a while," explains Wolfe about their first day together at Eno's studio. "It's a pub game where you throw glass discs into a hole. Then Brian brought out his perfume collection and we had an olfactory session. Perfect."

• • •

Eno and Wolfe had been very much aware of each other for some time, as you'd expect of two very groovy art sorts with back catalogues like theirs. But with Wolfe based in Los Angeles (she's a London-born Anglo-American and relocated to the States some years ago) and Eno firmly on a self-imposed, ecologically motivated flying ban, it wasn't until they both had exhibitions in London in 2023 that they met face-to-face.

The day after attending each other's event - namely Eno's light sculpture pieces at the Paul Stolper gallery in Bloomsbury and Wolfe's imPRINTING: The Artist's Brain installation at Somerset House - the pair were making music at Eno HQ.

"Brian had recently discovered Native Instruments' Playbox software, which gives you different textures and instruments by shuffling dice - it appealed to his shuffle sensibility," says Wolfe. "We ended up making two pieces. I played that sad little ukulele over there..."

She points at the instrument, tucked away in a comer behind several guitars.

"It was this feeling that we'd connected in all these other areas, then we were just messing around as we both like to do, and it was a lot of fun. I remember Brian saying, 'So we made two pieces. What are you doing tomorrow? Let's do this again!'."

Unfortunately, Wolfe was heading back home to LA the next day, so there was an interregnum until February last year, when the pair reunited and started making more songs. The way they tell it, the whole project was something of an organic coalescence, with Eno and Wolfe as jovial architects of the unforeseen.

In Gary Hustwit's Eno' documentary of 2024, Eno describes the whole process of creativity in terms of planting seeds and seeing what pops up, without interfering too much. Neither one of them was expecting an album from these playful get-togethers, much less three albums of what they term "dream music" and "space music" to materialise.

"We did think, 'Do you know what? We could probably put this together and make an album', then our works sort of diverged into two separate groups," says Eno. "One was very clearly songs, and one was clearly not songs. We called those 'nongs' - non-songs - so they were instrumentals really, but evocative instrumentals that seemed to have a sort of Western tumbleweed feel to them.

"And then, funnily enough, there were some other things that grew up in the middle that were sort of nongs with a bit of singing in them too. So some of those have made it onto Luminal. Others may have another future destination..."

He's referring to the third album, Liminal. which at the time of the interview was still In limbo.

"It was all very natural," he continues. "Lateral, the long piece, happened very quickly."

"I think the very surprising thing was how much of it happened quickly, and how much was exciting and enjoyable," adds Wolfe. "It was never a case of flogging any kind of a dead horse or any other animal. One afternoon we'd make seven pieces of music, but every time we got together to contain an area of them, they would sort of break out and start a whole new ecosystem.

"I think the wonderful thing was that we were making it because it felt really fun - and it still feels so much fun to me. Then at some point it's like, 'Oh, if we were to release this one, it might be in a song collection...'"

"And this might belong with that lot," interjects Eno. "And then these other pieces might belong with another lot and, hmm, dunno, maybe we need another lot for these ones'.

"But what was interesting to me is just starting with whatever you've got around. You can see this is not a big studio, and we never used most of these guitars."

He gestures at the handful of axes lurking in a corner, and pulls out the Fender Strat copy made by Fernandes.

"That was the guitar with which nearly everything was done."

"Brian has owned that guitar since 1981," chuckles Wolfe. "He originally bought it for his friend."

The friend in question was Bob Quine, the guitarist in Richard Hell & The Voidoids, who recorded with Eno frequently but only appeared on one of his albums - 1992's Nerve Net.

"It hasn't been serviced or given any love since then, so there's quite a lot of, let's say, accumulated harm," she continues. "Last week for Brian's birthday, I got it serviced. And I got another Fender with a noiseless pickup so we could play together, and it's opened up a whole new world..."

"Of clean sounds!" says Eno, laughing.

Sonically, the albums are not that clean - you can defintely hear the accumulated harm of the Fernandes guitar. The noises off and the imperfections are part of what gives the albums their intimate charm. While they have the usual high-fidelity quality you'd expect, these are not ironed-out audio experiences. The buffed-up, sterile sheen of modern pop is something you won't find here.

"Yes, it lets you know that it's not all made in Logic," says Eno, nodding sagely.

Certainly, the notion that you can feel the touch of human hands in music may well become increasingly more important to us, as technology keeps learning howto replicate nearly everything we can do.

After all, Al can't pick up a Fernandes Strat that hasn't been serviced in forty-five years and wring a tune out of it, can it?

• • •

This three-album splurge emerged from a place that both Eno and Wolfe like to inhabit - on the threshold of something, where the direction of travel is unknown, and with a willingness to poke a stick in the spokes and throw the entire process off-balance.

"We didn't start out with any intentions, really, and very rapidly found that we locked in together well," says Eno. "I loved setting up a sort of sound world, and she immediately got it and responded to it. So it was very rewarding, very quickly, most of the time.

"I don't think there was a single day where we didn't do or create something that we liked. You can have times like that in the studio, where you just keep plugging away at it all day and you get nothing at the end. This was always pretty fast. And if it wasn't, we'd go for a walk or a swim. There's a swimming pool just around the corner."

Another strategy they employed - yes, Eno's famous Oblique Strategies did play a role in the recordings - was that of deliberate destabilisation. While not as radical as the method he imposed on the long-suffering musicians in Bowie's band during the making of Lodger in 1979 - when he chalked up chords on a blackboard and made them change to whatever chord he pointed at with a stick, or had them swap instruments to introduce an element of uncertainty bordering on chaos - the idea remains central to Eno's approach.

"It was a case of sometimes thinking, 'Well, yeah, this is kind of quite regular what we're doing now, so it's probably going to go in a certain direction," he explains. "What about if we destabilise it by making it, say, a ten-bar cycle instead of an eight-bar cycle?'.

"Something as simple as that means you set out in a different direction at the beginning and guarantees you won't go to a lot of the places music could normally visit. So we did a bit of that. And we used Oblique Strategies so we would each have a card that we kept secret."

"There are two cards behind you, pinned to the wall there, that we used a few weeks ago," says Wolfe. "We still don't know what each other's card said."

"They make you turn your attention somewhere else," says Eno. "So you don't just roll down the same groove each time. But mostly it was sort of quickly responding to each other, hearing something and then thinking, 'Oh, I know what to do here... I know what would make that sound better... I know what could take that somewhere'. And I think we were both quite good at that. We're quite good at thinking, 'OK, forget everything, this is where we are now - what can we do?'.

"In fact, the thing I like most about the process is this feeling of coming in empty-handed and just seeing what happens. You know, saying, 'This is all we've got'. We work from quite a reduced palette of possibilities. We use the Omnichord quite a lot."

Ah yes, the Omnichord - Suzuki's kitsch electronic autoharp, which featured heavily on Eno's 1983 album with his brother Roger and Daniel Lanois, Apollo: Atmospheres & Soundtracks. It lurks in the Eno/Wolfe collaboration, bringing a sort of space cowboy-ish, country-and-western mood to several pieces.

"I don't know why that is so attractive - it relates to the sense that cowboys were kind of at the edge of a new world," says Eno. "They were in unfamiliar territory, but it's somehow enchanted, unfamiliar territory. That was why I thought it was appropriate in Apollo because that was about another sort of pioneering.

"I think pioneering is one of the things that art can give you a good feeling for - being at the edge of something new and having one foot in the past, and an antenna finger going into the future."

"And draw from both," adds Wolfe. "There's so much we need to reclaim, but we also need to innovate. But how, when and why you do that takes quite a lot of discernment. It's not simply that obviously everything new is better, or everything old is obsolete. There's a lot of processing you have to do, to extract which things you want to take with you and which things you want to create."

"Innovation generally takes several forms," says Eno. "One is genuine novelty, where somebody does a thing that nobody's ever done before. That's what people usually think of when they hear the word 'innovation'. But then there's also re-evaluatlon, where you do something again that has been done before, but it's now, so it's in a different context - it has a different meaning, a different value.

"Innovation is a complicated thing. It isn't as simple and easy as just presenting something new. It can be presenting an old idea in a different way. It can also be leaving something out, where you're doing the same thing that people have been doing, but you've left part of it out.

"An interesting thing happens when you use a familiar palette, but you omit a part of it. I think that absence produces a different feeling, a longing, a sense of the unresolved."

• • •

As Q2 of the twenty-first century gets underway, perhaps one important element in danger of being left out of proceedings is humanity itself. Whether we like it or not, at the moment we're all on a profound pioneering journey into an unknown future of technological complexity, far beyond what most of us can comprehend. And yes, I mean AI.

As this technology continues to frog-march us into a new reality which will perhaps dispense with human input, here are Eno and Wolfe making things very human indeed. While they both have an interest in algorithmic and systems music, their motivations are clearly sensual - as in, their work seeks to engage all the senses.

There's Eno's abiding interest in light sculptures and colour - from video installations and using TVs as abstract light sources to his light boxes and the light sculpture/record player he made last year (Turntable II - an etched edition of one hundred and fifty signed by Eno can be yours for a mere £24,000). Or his perfume obsession, which dates back to 1965 - rubbing perfumes on "anyone kind enough to loan me a patch of their skin, then sniffing to test the effects," he told Details magazine in 1992, was and remains "a great way to get to know people".

Wolfe's various installations and projects, meanwhile, always seem to be trying to convert the abstract into real experiences, like her From Green To Red video statement/protest art piece, which condensed 800,000 years of NASA's climate data into a beautiful flow of green and red threads to show the impact that humans are having on the planet. Or the Palm Top Theater, a device using a Pepper's Ghost illusion to create a 3D effect for an album being played on an iPhone, specifically her 2013 long-player, 8ight.

"The Palm Top Theater was at that point when we'd gone from physical to digital, and digital was iTunes, so suddenly people were all listening to music on the phone," says Wolfe. "It was a way of turning the phone into a sort of magical experience, which was a 3D theatre for the palm of the hand. So you could watch a record using the Pepper's Ghost mechanism, and it brought it to life."

Like a whole host of innovations, this created a very interesting point of conversation but ultimately didn't become a mainstream commercial proposition.

"It seemed so obvious," adds Wolfe. "I thought everyone would be doing those things, because they must similarly be dismayed that there isn't the art form, ceremony and the whole experience around listening to music that there was with vinyl."

Wolfe's appreciation of the physical experience comes from her upbringing, living in a flat where her father, a dealer in rare books, would keep his stock.

"He couldn't afford a shop, so he would have all his books, like Ptolemy and Copernicus and Darwin, in his little flat. As kids, me and my brother were encouraged to look through them. These were made to last, you know? So we'd be leafing through Darwin's The Origin Of Species or Galileo's Starry Messenger. And it genuinely imprinted on me the sense that you could have an object that was a way of patenting and formulating an idea. It was an art form, and it was made for centuries.

"It's really about transcending the time that you're in and making something, even if there isn't an obvious inherent value right at that specific moment. And I feel that these kinds of identified tangibility, storytelling and ceremony in any experience are fundamental for the Information - whether that's audio, climate data or whatever -to actually go in deep and stay fully with you.

"You kind of need something physical. You need a ceremony of ritual around the experience, and you need a story. It imprints, and sort of forms who you are on a very deep level. And it becomes part of your DNA."

• • •

Given all that, then, how is AI likely to impact and determine creative practice?

"I think we have to regard AI not as an artificial version of our intelligence, but the invention of a new form of it, one which will have strengths we have no conception of," says Eno. "It will also have weaknesses of which we have no conception. We won't be able to understand the weaknesses immediately, just as we didn't understand that making the mission of social media to maximise engagement was a pernicious idea, which is what Mark Zuckerberg and others did.

"Their thinking was to make social media a commercial success. The main thing was to keep people on it constantly - to get people addicted to it, essentially. The process of driving people to more and more sensational and divisive content.

"We realise now there's a big consequence to that. So I think it takes a long, long time for the problematic part, the unexpected part, to fully play out. And then when it does, you're already in the shit. It's too late to do much about it."

"I think especially when costs aren't factored in," agrees Wolfe. "Something I feel absolutely with the digital era is that technology has fast-tracked so many aspects of being a human being, but at the same time it's short-changed us in so many ways.

"It hasn't actually accounted for the costs in the process of fast-tracking, which is why you have not only the environmental deficit, but many others too.

"I also feel with these technological explorations, 'How can we take the best of the old and the best of the new?'. And the thing with art is it's the humanity that moves us. It's those textures that are not quite right, and the cracks and the imperfections. I think we have to safeguard our imperfect humanity in art, because it is what helps us to reach that level where music can be medicine.

"That is definitely something we've done with this music - fully embrace all of the imperfections and all the mess. A lot of it is Brian creating masterful sounds, as opposed to using anything generic. But we've actually not used anything standard - you know, certain tunings or quantising. It's all completely raw in that sense. I think we need more mess in art, because it's really vital."

"Mess is proof of work," agrees Eno. "Mess is what tells you that a person was involved. That seal of authority, that this came out of a human mind, makes us able to engage with it as another human, and you're not able to engage with a thing that you know came out of some sort of sequencer type.

"I mean, I wrote a lot of stuff using a Markov generator, a Markov chain, which is a way of generating sequences - that's used a lot in artificial intelligence now. I found it would churn out tons of stuff, but the interesting part of the problem is where you filter the inputs and the outputs.

"So the interesting part of the mechanism isn't the Markov chain generator itself. It's the human being at either end of it who makes the decisions about what goes in and what comes out. I think AI is so dazzling in its speed that we've forgotten it's humans who are actually the bit that will make it work or give us results that we can make use of.

"I can remember the first few pictures I did with AI. I initially thought, 'God, this is sensational!'. Then after about forty minutes, I was completely bored by them. I realised there was a limitless amount of them, and none of them had more value than any of the others because I didn't believe in them.

"Part of the investment you make in a work of art, whether it's a pop record or a great painting, is saying, 'I surrender to this because I trust it. I'm prepared to let it happen to me because something special will result'. If you're aware that it's just another thing that came out of a machine, it's very hard to make that surrender."

"I think it goes beyond that," says Wolfe. "Because it's not a mental switch - it's something we still don't understand. When you look at music and the brain, it imprints - music imprints deeper on the brain than any other experience. It's the only thing that activates the entire brain.

"Oliver Sacks, who I think is fantastic for grounding so much of what we know intuitively about music, was still at the very tip of the melting iceberg in knowing why someone who's catatonic can get up and dance from hearing something. So I do think there is a real quality of human creation, like those rare books, or a voice that has an oddness to it, or a timing that's peculiar... it's the idiosyncrasies that you would never programme in to begin with. And it's also the sheen - if you're thinking about AI music and AI art, there's a sheen to it that's so unnatural."

"That's what gets boring," says Eno. "My friend, the architect Rem Koolhaas, worked for many, many years with a big team, and they were all drawing and making things by moving matchboxes around and putting pencils out to represent lines, all that sort of thing. Then in about the mid-'90s, they started using computers. And for a while, everything fell apart because you could so very easily make anything look convincing on a computer.

"In an hour, you could have a 3D model with reflections on the windows and trees and people walking by. And he said the problem was that it stopped people from thinking further. If you're doing it with a matchbox, a pencil and a bit of Silly Putty or something like that, you have to actually come up with an idea, whereas with the computer... he called it the myth of premature sheen - things look too good, too quickly. And you stop pushing."

Can art save the world, then? Brian Eno evidently doesn't think so - at least, not in the way people often hope.

"Artists don't put out fires," he says, reflecting on the endless calls for him to lend his voice to causes, campaigns and crises. "I'm not a fireman. That isn't my job, and I'm not particularly good at it."

Instead, Eno sees art as being slower, subtler and in essence, more transformative - "preparing the cultural soil", as he puts it. Rather than rushing into a room shouting ideological truths, art reshapes what people think is valuable, reframes what is seen and unseen, and shifts the boundaries of empathy over time. Somewhat startlingly, he points to Harriet Beecher Stowe's 1852 anti-slavery novel Uncle Tom's Cabin as an example.

"People always make fun of it," he says. "But in fact, it changed the world in a way, because it made us entertain the possibility that those black people had the same feelings as us white people - they felt pain, shame, pleasure and humiliation and all the other things, just like we did. And if you believe that, you can't treat somebody as a slave anymore. That's the kind of thing that art can do, but it isn't a quick process."

Beatie Wolfe sees art's potential as being even more subversive and more immediate.

"I feel like there's actually a special untapped potential of art," she says. "Because it can take things that are so complex or macro - that most people would just say, 'Sorry, I really can't get my head around that' to - and distil it into a pill, something palatable that you consume without even realising you're absorbing it."

In her climate-focused works, Wolfe has turned sprawling datasets into experiences that people can feel instead of charts they have to parse.

"Rather than needing some kind of explanation, you can have an experience where you then intuitively get it," she says.

She likes to imagine artists as "rogue agents", free from the ingrained hierarchies and constraints of institutions, governments or corporations, able to slip past intellectual defences and "create another way in", quietly reshaping how we see, understand and respond to the world.

"We did these recordings completely on feelings," says Eno. "I don't think we ever discussed messages. It was just, 'This feels good, let's carry on with it and see whatever the feeling is. Let's see how we make more of it, make it clearer or bring it into focus'. But we never discussed what those feelings were very much, partly because they're usually quite complicated."

"It's not that common, even with great music, to get a sense that there are eight feelings there simultaneously, all sort of pulling in different directions," says Wolfe. "And that is something we both really love about the music we like, which is actually very similar. It's because it has all those different flavours within it. Because that's how life is, and the best of things are contradictory and rich."

Luminal, Lateral and Liminal are part of the quiet work of artists - not simply firefighting, but actively planting the seeds for a different future.

Luminal and Lateral are out now, and Liminal is released on October 10, all on Decca/Verve

• • •

BRIAN ENO & BEATIE WOLFE: 10 SELECTED WORKS

Brian Eno and Beatie Wolfe are far more than simple musicians. From ingenious and engaging sound art to thought-provoking exhibitions and installations, here is a potted guide to some of their works beyond music

BRIAN ENO

TURNTABLE II - "When it doesn't have to do anything in particular, like play a record, it's a sculpture," Eno told the cultural critic Rick Poynor when he announced his playful glowing turntable with an asymmetrically placed platter in 2024. Making a turntable into a piece of art which gradually shifts its appearance over time, just as his music does, is a none-more-Eno move. Cast in acrylic with LED lights. Turntable II comes in a limited edition of a hundred and fifty, with Eno's signature and the edition number engraved on the side of the base. It also comes with a price tag of £s;24,000. We'll take two.

SPEAKER VASES - The theme of turning sound into sculptures continues with Eno's speaker vase pieces. Filipendula was a one-off sound sculpture which arranged a pair of speakers in a vase as if they were flowers. The piece was named after a genus of flowering plant that grows up to two metres tall. Eno has always been fascinated by speakers. Before he was in Roxy Music he used to buy old speakers and make new cabinets for them to see how the sound would change.

"I had Filipendula in the comer of my studio, and I'd sit here and work on my own at night," Eno told his gallerist Paul Stolper. "It seemed to open up the room to the outside world, and it gives that feeling that you're no longer in a box separated from everything else."

77 MILLION PAINTINGS - 77 Million Paintings was first shown in Tokyo and then released in 2006 as a digital art/software DVD which combined digital paintings with generative music, the idea being that you never see the same image twice. It was inspired by seeing large wall-mounted TVs which looked like giant ugly black holes in people's living rooms. What if the screen could be a frame for environment-shifting light paintings and soundscapes?

"Instead of a dead hole in the wall, you can have a living picture," as Eno put it. With some clever maths, 296 individual paintings become 77 million (shown in random combinations of four overlaid images, which gives a total of possible permutations of just under 77 million). As an Eno aphorism in the sleeve notes says, 'Future TV will be made with simple equipment, unqualified people, small budgets and bad taste". He got that right.

LIGHT BOXES - Eno quickly twigged on to the fact that televisions were randomly generating light boxes and used them in some of his early works. Crystals, which featured TVs on their backs with semi-translucent boxes placed over them, debuted in 1983. You could see his Light Box concept as a natural simplification of these early TV experiments.

"If a painting is hanging on a wall, we don't feel that we're missing something by not paying attention to it," he claimed. "Yet with music and video, we still have the expectation of some kind of drama. My music and videos do change, but they change slowly, in such a way that it doesn't matter if you miss a bit."

LENTICULARS - Eno's Lenticular works started appearing in 2016. Using a lenticular printing technique which places sheets of lenticules (micro lenses) over interlaced images, whatthe viewer actually sees depends on their position and their movement. The large (around 50cm x 50cm) black and white cross lenticular in Eno's studio flashes as you walk past it and is quite dramatic. Eno's lenticular prints exist somewhere between painting and generative video, a sensory space that shifts as the viewer moves, very much like his ambient visual installations.

BEATIE WOLFE

FROM GREEN TO RED - Tagged "an environmental statement". From Green To Red is a video piece inspired by a graph of NASA data showing the carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere over 800,000 years. It stayed below 300 parts per million until 1911, and today it's at 420 parts. The short video represents this data as cotton or woollen threads floating through time and space, and gradually turning red - it's simple, beautiful and powerful. It was projected diectly onto Glasgow's SEC Armadillo building at COP26, the 2021 United Nations Climate Change Conference.

IMPRINTING: THE ARTIST'S BRAIN - For this literally mind-expanding project, Wolfe designed a "thinking cap" into which was woven data-encoded glass chips, each one representing various channels of her mind. Old wall-mounted telephones - "listening stations" -were plugged into the hats, and audience members could hear and explore the various channels. Did you know that you can encode data onto glass? It lasts for around 10,000 years, apparently.

POSTCARDS FOR DEMOCRACY - In the summer of 2020, when a politically charged crisis hit the US postal service just as postal voting would be a critical factor in the upcoming US election, Wolfe teamed up with Devo frontman and lifelong postcard art enthusiast Mark Mothersbaugh for this project. They invited members of the public in the US to send postcard art through the US Postal Service to Mothersbaugh's lime green, spaceshipshaped studio in LA. These were then curated for an exhibition. The idea was to focus attention on the threats to the USPS and also democracy itself.

MONTAGU SQUARE MUSICAL JACKET - In an attempt to bring some ceremony and tactile meaning to an album release, Wolfe came up with The Montagu Square Musical Jacket. For her second album, she recorded in the 34 Montagu Square flat once leased by Ringo Starr, which he later rented to fellow Beatle Paul McCartney (it's where he composed Eleanor Rigby), and to John Lennon, who lived at the flat for three months in 1968 and took the famous Two Virgins nude selfie there with Yoko Ono.

The recording was then encoded into a woven jacket cut by tailor Mr Fish, which was NFC-enabled, allowing people to tap their phone on the jacket to listen to the album. As she says on her website, Wolfe "saw the Montagu Square wearable album jacket as a truly tailored album release for the twenty-first century".

RAW SPACE BROADCAST - Wolfe's third album, Raw Space, was launched from Bell Labs' anechoic chamber ("the world's quietest room") as a week-long animation/AR livest ream. She then went to New Jersey to Bell Labs' Holmdel Horn Antenna, a radio telescope built in the early 1960s and used by astronomers Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson in their discovery of cosmic microwave background radiation, which provided evidence for the Big Bang theory of the creation of the universe. Wolfe teamed up with Wilson, who made some technical adjustments to the antenna and beamed the anechoic version of the album into deep space.

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