Icelandic singer/poet Bjork seems particularly—and literally—suited to surf the fractal wave of noise we call the Internet. Her Biophilia, the first album app when it was released in 2011, is now the first app to be inducted into the New York Museum of Modern Art’s permanent collection. Paola Antonelli, MOMA department of architecture and design’s senior curator, told icenews.is that, from Biophilia‘s release, she contemplated including it. This was only one year after iPad’s birth—developers and design types were crazily noodling with apps using a device whose display was larger than an iPhone. Among the many who admire Bjork’s innovation and mesmerizing persona, Antonelli lauds the singer for creatively altering—and enhancing—how people experience music, enabling them to step outside the traditional passive mode into making visuals and music and even performing.
The Biophilia app translated tracks into mini-games, giving users interactive roles: reconfiguring content at will, or simply playing with it. The Biophilia project proved so well received it's been morphed into an interactive learning tool: the Biophilia Educational Program. Like the mysterious elvin entity in her "Human Behavior" MTV video, Bjork is a canny, intelligent observer, and may very well have a hand in technological (hence social) evolution.
