The sweat drips down your face, your neck aches, your head spins, your stomach heaves with motion sickness. If you’re looking for an immersive experience that makes you feel like you’ve done all the wrong drugs, at the same time, in a swamp, with the flu, in war-torn Vietnam, after a bad kebab, then, boy-oh-boy, is ‘Björk Digital’ going to make your dreams come true. This multimedia exhibition pulls together all the immersive videos the Icelandic singer created for her 2015 album ‘Vulnicura’, and it’s a wild ride. Get ready for lots of wailing, and a first chance to try the latest virtual reality headsets.
Parts of it are great. It’s awesome to get swirled around inside someone’s gob for a while in ‘Mouth Mantra’ and it’s a total rush to have a giant digi-Björk stomping around you in ‘Notget’. Loads of the visuals are stunning too, and they’re the real stars of the show.
But lots of it isn’t that great. The barely immersive ‘Black Lake’ is just a two-screened music video, and the novelty of endlessly spinning around on your stool in the 360-degree ‘Stonemilker’ wears off pretty quickly. Then there’s a whole room of tablets displaying the ‘Biophilia’ app, which you can download for free anyway.
It doesn’t help that the galleries are too hot and the VR headsets too heavy – you end up fogging up the lenses with perspiration, and whirling around so much that you get whiplash. Being herded around the galleries makes you feel like arty cattle, and eventually the virtual-reality experience wears thin, you end up overheated, a little seasick and a little sore in the neck.
Björk is clearly a visionary, a pioneer, exploiting the latest technologies for her own purposes, but in the end, this quirky technology is going to age badly. We’ll look back at these graphics, and these huge clunky headsets, in the same way as we look back at those giant brick mobile phones, or using leeches in medicine, or Jim Davidson: painfully archaic.
If you’re anything other than an avid fan of the singer, you’ll likely come away feeling like you’ve just watched a bunch of music videos and had the chance to use a VR headset. It’s not really art, and not really that immersive, it’s just a lot of inbetweeniness and promos.There's nothing really wrong with any of that, but is it worth £15?
