In the world of avant-pop star and multimedia auteur Björk, nature and technology are often synonymous, operating in harmony as elements of a shared ecosystem. “All the moderns things, like cars and such, have always existed,” she sings on her 1995 record, Post. “They’ve just been waiting to come out, and multiply, and take over. It’s their turn now.” Intended as a playful riposte to doubters who’d accused her of selling out to electronic music, the lyrics also point to her career-long embrace of technology and nature as symbiotic forms. In a sense, technology has always existed in some form, be it a stone hammer or a microchip, been a product of what we arbitrarily call the natural world. What are those modern things but nature’s transformation, alchemised from the universe that surrounds us?
“Sometimes I think nature and techno is the same word, it just depends on if it’s past or future,” Björk explained to The South Bank Show in 1997. “One thousand years ago you’d look at a log cabin in the forest, and that would be techno. And now it’s nature.” For an artist who grew up in the geographic extremes of Iceland, nature represented a wild world of pagan myth and transformative possibility, not unlike the clip for The Sugarcubes’ ‘Birthday’, which screens among a selection of her film and video work in ACMI’s Focus on Björk program. Like Nikola Tesla before her, Björk spoke of nature’s inherent technological power. “Electricity has always existed and it’s not just a phenomenon of this century,” she said. “It has always been in thunder and lightning and in Iceland in Thor’s Hammer.”
Might sufficiently advanced technology, then – as the old Arthur C. Clarke line goes – be simply “indistinguishable from magic”? In a wonderful, and much-memed 1988 TV clip, Björk dispels superstitions around television’s supposed soul-sucking magic by dissembling her Sony Trinitron and uncovering a miniature eco-system, as vast and teeming as any that might occur in the natural world. The idea returns in Michel Gondry’s exhilarating 1996 clip for Björk’s ‘Hyperballad’, in which the sleeping singer dreams in digital screens and cities, as though nested inside the cathode tube, and in their collaboration on 1995’s ‘Isobel’, the story of a girl raised in nature who discovers the pebbles beneath her feet are baby skyscrapers, the flowers are lightbulbs and that the moths are tiny, buzzing bi-planes.
Björk’s holistic embrace of nature and technology would arrive in force with her landmark 1997 album Homogenic, an efflorescent fusion of beats and strings in which the music replicated the force and fury of volcanoes, geysers, and glaciers. The beats crunch seismically in ‘Jóga’, as though compelled by movement in the earth’s crust, an effect captured by Gondry’s deceptively intricate music video, which digitally stitches together aerial still photographs for the illusion of shifting tectonic plates. From mountaintop to laptop, nature and technology began to entwine like strands of DNA. The 2001 video for Vespertine’s ‘Hidden Place’, co-directed by M/M Paris, Inez and Vinoodh, turns Björk’s face into a digital playground, the camera mapping her contours in extreme close-up as bionic ooze slithers in and out of her orifices. In ‘Nature Is Ancient’, one of several videos created by the LynnFox collective for the star’s 2003 Greatest Hits tour, computer-generated graphics render the microscopic birth of a star-child Björk, while the beats throb with the amniotic rhythm of the womb. The seeds of life recur in their 2003 clip for Medúlla’s ‘Desired Constellation’, with its spectral fish circling the night sky, and in 2004’s ‘Oceania’, in which the singer commands a digital menagerie that could be underwater, in space, or on an Apple screensaver – patterns recurring in nature and technology alike.
Common to so much of Björk’s multi-media work are images of the body as a site of post- (and sometimes, pre-) human transformation, a marriage of the natural and the technological commensurate with the artist’s vision. In Nick Knight’s visceral 2001 clip for ‘Pagan Poetry’, nature and technology fuse literally, as needles sew pearls into flesh and sex is rendered in digital abstraction. The Tolkienian shapeshifter, part-Björk and part-polar bear, of Paul White’s 1998 clip for ‘Hunter’ conjures the shamanistic image of woman and beast locked in a battle for a true self – and accepting both as essential forms of the flesh. Then there’s Chris Cunningham’s celebrated 1999 music video for ‘All Is Full of Love’ – its title a key to the singer’s worldview – in which a cybernetic Björk is constructed for a romantic encounter with its doppelgänger, all pistons and probes and pre-millennial prophecy.
While Björk’s cyber-tryst flipped fin-de-millénaire anxiety into a soulful vision of the future, a quarter-century later culture has strayed from her utopian ideas around sentient machina. At best, technology has become a bland prothesis for everyday life; at worst, the grisly provenance of exploitative tech-bro capitalism. Either way, it’s a world in which the waste generated by technology, and its environmental impact, has outpaced the ecosystem’s ability to process it. Long an advocate for environmental causes, Björk has responded by doubling down on her inclusive visions of the future on 2017’s ‘Utopia’, and in 2022’s Fossora, a “biological techno” meditation on the Earth from a matriarchal perspective. “I see myself as someone who builds bridges between the human things we do every day, and technology,” Björk said to The Guardian in 2016. “For a woman, I think it is really empowering because I don’t need the whole patriarchy of the studio and that whole universe to make my music.”
Her most ambitious work to date, 2011’s expansive multi-media project Biophilia imagined a radical union of technology and nature, redefining how sound is made by using naturally occurring phenomena to create music. Where Medúlla had demonstrated how the human voice could sound like technology, Biophilia expanded this notion to nature as a whole; just as a lyrebird can replicate the wailing of cellphones and car alarms, so might gravity power a pendulum-driven harp, or the crackle of lightning generate a song’s bass-line (much of this was replicated on stage, as captured in Nick Fenton and Peter Strickland’s 2014 concert film). The album’s lead single ‘Crystalline’ mimics the structure of crystal formations, while Michel Gondry’s music video sees Björk – somewhere between Méliès moon-god and cosmic disco ball – raining meteor shards upon a lunar surface.
Tangibly, Biophilia also manifested Björk’s belief in music-making as accessible to everyone. The project came with an interactive app that allowed users to create sound via touch-screen. If technology could function as an extension of the body, then it could also serve in its healing process, a kind of emotional catharsis; in 2016’s immersive virtual reality exhibit Björk Digital, visitors could crawl inside the singer’s mouth, or help sew up her wound, playing romantic surgeon to the open-wound heartbreak of her 2015 album, Vulcinara.
“For me, nature and technology stand for hope, and for a movement onwards to the future,” Björk told The Creative Independent in 2016. “If there is to be hope, we have to unite technology and nature. You have to make them coexist, and they have to be able to work together. I mean, it has to happen, if we’re going to survive.”
– Luke Goodsell