Björk's 2015 album Vulnicura tells the story of the Icelandic pop artist's emotional journey following a painful breakup with her then-longtime partner, American artist Matthew Barney.
"I realized that I'd written a whole heartbreak album," said Björk in an exclusive interview with NPR. "And it's like a bit of a tricky genre to tap into."
Björk said VR seemed like the ideal medium beyond the album to share her heartbreak at the time. "What most people were complaining about with VR is it was very isolating," Björk said. "And I was like, 'Wow. Perfect. It's gonna be good in this lonely, solitary journey.'"
A newly remastered version of Vulnicura VR available on the Apple Vision Pro headset (and soon Meta Quest; the release date is still pending) enables fans to experience this journey alongside Björk.
When the album opens, the user finds themselves navigating across an austere Icelandic landscape of imposing mountains, leaden skies and minutely-detailed moss. At one point, Björk dissolves into a shower of tiny particles. At another, the user can reach out and grab long threads to stitch together Björk's broken heart.
Created by the San Francisco-based VR music company PulseJet Studios, the new version updates a project the artist first created about a decade ago, back when the technology was in a very different place.
When Björk first released parts of Vulnicura VR, consumer VR was the hot new thing. HTC and Oculus came out with groundbreaking headsets. Online app stores touted new immersive video content. Filmmakers were gaining attention for cutting-edge films that exploited the intimacy and immersive properties of the medium, such as Matthew Cooke's short VR offering Confinement, about solitary confinement in U.S. prisons.
But the technology was limited, and the many artists working on Björk's ambitious project faced these limitations head on – even though the work was in many ways groundbreaking. "Björk really took advantage of the intimacy of the medium,"said Los Angeles-based filmmaker Andrew Thomas Huang, who has been involved with Vulnicura VR since its earliest days. "But it was very DIY."
The original project was conceived iteratively as part of Björk Digital, an exhibition about Björk's career that ran from 2016-2020 at various museums around the world such as New York's Museum of Modern Art and the Miraikan in Tokyo. Huang said Björk collaborated with a bunch of different artists and assorted technologies on creating immersive video versions of some of the Vulnicura album's songs for these installations. As such, the initial versions of Vulnicura VR could only be viewed by museum visitors. They had to be tethered to computers and carry unwieldy controls in their hands. "It was very clunky," Huang said. "And sometimes the computers wouldn't work."
In 2019, Björk released a version of Vulnicura VR for Steam-accessible headsets. This widened the audience for the work. But it had some of the same limitations as the museum versions, such as the need for computers and hand controls. "We saw a big opportunity to improve graphics and navigation with new technology and the new all-in-one headsets," said PulseJet Studios founder John Gearty. "The 2019 version still runs, but this one is a lot easier to get around."
With the newly remastered iteration for the "all-in-one" headset, users can roam freely and use their bare hands to explore Björk's world. The navigation between the songs is more intuitive, and the visual effects, sharper. The spatial audio has been enhanced, too. "We painstakingly developed moss and rocks and flowers," said Gearty, of working on the new version.
Gearty said he hopes more musicians will take Björk's lead and explore VR's artistic potential beyond the immersive concert experiences offered lately by artists like Sabrina Carpenter and bands such as Metallica.
"This isn't just TV," said Gearty. "We are pretty committed to thinking about the entire experience differently and surrounding the user with an artistic vision you can't see every day."
Björk's project arrives in its remastered version at an inflection point for the VR industry. A recent report from the market intelligence company International Data Corporation (IDC) forecasts a compound annual growth rate of nearly 40% between this year and 2029. At the same time, more than half of the game developers who participated in a recent survey about VR said the industry is stagnating.
"I continue to believe VR has tremendous creative potential, particularly with regard to live performance," said Charlie Fink, a producer, podcaster, author, and Chapman University lecturer in the immersive technology space. "That said, VR has not achieved the commercial success everyone thought was possible ten years ago."
For her part, Björk said she's interested to see where artists take the medium in the future, and she's delighted that the new version of Vulnicura VR can now reach many more people. "I have always liked the democracy feeling about music," she said.
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