A choral mystery about Amelia Earhart that became three linked forms: programmable blockchain music, a physical radio object, and an immersive performance environment.
How do we immortalize the voice of an ignored woman who more than likely heard the final transmissions of Amelia Earhart as she was taken off her flight path? Betty's Notebook begins with Betty Klenck, a teenage girl listening to a shortwave radio in 1937, writing down a distress call that history struggled to believe. The work turns that act of listening into a composable score: voice, interference, image, and memory can be recombined without losing the central question of who gets heard.
Created with Bryan Brinkman and Verdigris Ensemble on Async Music, the NFT system contains a master work and four stems. Each stem holds three variants, allowing the owner configuration to change the visual and musical state of the piece.
The blockchain work extended into a physical shortwave-radio object co-built with Atomic Form. The object gives the digital composition a room-scale body: speakers, screen, cabinet, and signal.
In performance, singers, electronics, projections, and archival traces surround the audience. The concert becomes a transmission field: a communal attempt to hear through static, speculation, and memory.
The stem system is better experienced than explained. Open the player to see Bryan Brinkman's artwork layers and hear the official stems recombine in real time.
The radio matters because it keeps the metaphor honest. Betty's original act was not abstract data collection; it was listening, alone, through a machine. The physical object returns the NFT to that origin: a viewer encounters the work as a tuned apparatus, not just a screen.
Co-built with Atomic Form, the life-size shortwave-radio object debuted at Terminal 5 during NFT NYC. The object includes a screen and speakers and updates to the latest audio-visual variants in real time.
The newest stage of Betty's Notebook expands the work into a semi-permanent visual and aural installation. Audiences move room by room through shifting soundscapes, projections, and archival fragments, following the sensation of a 1930s shortwave radio and adding their own voices back into the archive.
