Ever since she became a solo artist with the release of 1992’s album Debut, Björk has consistently been instrumental in breaking the barriers between music and visual art.
Whether it be by leading the music video Renaissance throughout the 90’s (primarily through her collaborations with Michel Gondry), her well documented partnership with Matthew Barney, or her stunning live performances, Björk’s music is completely intertwined with a visual panache singular to her. It is only fitting, as technological development provides more opportunities, that she would blaze trails into the new mediums of apps and virtual reality.
The Björk Digital experience, currently on view at Magic Box at the Reef, represents a retrospective of the past 4 years of her digital explorations.
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Ostensibly, Björk Digital is a curated progression of VR music video experiences, with a couple notable exceptions. This serves as an excellent snapshot of where VR is at this moment in time, and should be viewed as a baseline for the technology and how it could be used. What is fascinating is how Bjork’s different collaborators treated the medium of VR, some as a passive wraparound movie, others as more complete, volumetric (meaning you can actually move through the virtual space) environments with interactive elements for you to play with.
Of the non-VR experiences at Björk Digital, the stand out is LA based filmmaker Andrew Thomas Huang’s Black Lake. ((http://www.andrewthomashuang.com)). Huang directed about half of the pieces in the exhibit both VR (Stonemilker and Family) and non-VR (Black Lake), demonstrating both a sensitivity to space and music, allowing the viewer a moment to breathe. To establish a sense of presence.
As opposed to the headphone space of VR, Black Lake is a dual screened video played back in a room with a bespoke 50 speaker setup. As it’s one of the few experiences where you can viscerally feel the music all around you, it gave the sound designer in me a little more joy than the rest of the experiences where I was sonically sequestered within my own head. It’s also fascinating as it’s one of the few times within the entire exhibit where you can get a sense of how your fellow digital travelers are enjoying their experience. Otherwise you don’t get to have a collective breathe until you’re left in a room at the end, where a loop of 25 years of Björk’s music videos are playing continuously (albeit with an extraordinary sound system).
As a retrospective, about half of the Björk Digital experience has been available for a long time. The exhibit begins with her long available Biophilia App Suite. Stonemilker was released as a standalone VR app for the iPhone in 2015, and the loop of music videos are mostly available on YouTube. That being said, you rarely get the opportunity to see as much VR done in different ways in a single setting. So as both a Björk completest and a technologist, this was a wholly worthwhile endeavor. But if you don’t fall into either category, I doubt you would be engaged.
Björk Digital runs through June 4th from 10AM — 9PM with ticketed slots every 15 minutes.$35. Presented by the LA Philharmonic at Magic Box At The Reef; 1933 S. Broadway, Los Angeles.
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