British naturalist David Attenborough sang a siren song of modernity when in 2011 he lent his voice to the introduction of the world's first app-album: Bjork's Biophilia.
The cadences of Attenborough's voice have, during the course of his 60 year career as a BBC journalist, brought the wonders of the natural world into contemporary consciousness. His narration has spanned the vastness of our planet's history; from the first ice age, to the extinction of the dinosaurs, to the first humans in the Middle Paleolithic. Such is his eloquence that the most apocalyptic of natural disasters become pleasing on the ear.
So when we come to explore our own age, Attenborough's voice is both a natural and subversive harbinger of a new form; the app-album. Bjork's Biophilia, a set of love songs to the natural world, is articulated in the artificial terms of the mobile app. Listeners are lured by a calm and credible voice into Bjork's frenetically creative virtual reality, where scientific and creative praxes collide. Our complicity in the simultaneity of these dialectics, our participation in paradox, is frequently required of us by modern life. Modernity entails an awareness of the virtual.
This year's Berlinale famously included a virtual reality headset that plunged the Brandenburg Gate and crowds beneath underwater in a dizzying scopic assault. Ann Vries's digital film 'Critical Mass: Pure Immanence' reified thousands of festival goers into a constellation, revelatory of a reality beyond the egoism of the individual. Using the same principle but in a less sensational way, Bjork’s Biophilia album and apps also use the virtual combined with the natural to conjure her music. Amongst other sources within the natural world, Bjork visualises her music as constellations of crystalline structures. These forms stretch far beyond the concerns of our time, predating human consciousness, sexual reproduction or even photosynthesis. Creativity is elided with crystallisation, which, like music and computer code, combines regularity with free-form.
The art, science and music project Harmonic Ratios: Music and Crystals is the result of an interdisciplinary collaboration between a crystallographer, a curator, an academic, visual and sonic artists. Its format reflects the evolution in digital age artistic production beyond revelations about the emptiness of the signifier into a more gregarious, protean practice. Why this prevalence of collaboration among contemporary culture-makers? Barthes' intertextuality, with its weave of cultural warp and weft threads, prefigured the infinitely more complex world wide web.
Harmonic Ratios collaborator Dr Hilary Baker lectures at the Berlin Freie Universitat on the interstices between the digital age and musical production, and also makes music herself (https://soundcloud.com/hilary-baker). She has noted in particular the cloud-like quality of modern musical production and distribution. Despite well-reviewed previous work, participating visual artist Sean Revell will release his new album of electronic music anonymously, obscuring himself in this cloud. Artists are seizing the newly available plasticity of digital media to exact a reshaping of contemporary culture that is, in a quiet though ineluctable way, revolutionary. As in Bjork's sonic constellations, the ambition of the digital world is galactic and in the floating abeyance of form that is digital space, modern artists are finding new ground.
Yet this art is not without cynicism about the emancipatory potential of digitalism. In Harmonic Ratios, Daniel Stempfer's vibrating rainbows offer us a guiding thread through the Minotaur's maze, before bouncing playfully and impotently back on themselves. The inherent danger of the confusingly nebulous atmosphere is our increased susceptibility to seduction by artifice, lost as we are in a sea of voices. When, in 'Crystalline', Bjork refers to an 'internal nebula', her focus is not on the complexity of external signs and proliferating forms of meaning, but on a corresponding internal, subjective landscape; an echoic relation between the creator's inner and outer worlds. Diversification of identity therefore accompanies digitalism's reorientation of social life from the vertical to horizontal axis.
As Berlin embraces Syrian refugees, the Berlinale was a prism of different and 'other' voices. The exhibition included the video work 'Homeland' by Turkish artist Halil Altindere. In the film, refugees flip balletically over barbed wire fences, led by Syrian rapper Mohammed Abu Hajar, while drones buzz overhead like artificial eyes that implicate the viewer. Wall-climbing has particular significance in Berlin of course. Still recuperating from its rivenness, this scarred, tattooed and graffiti-ed city retains a predilection for transgression and aesthetic expression. Berlin's continuing appetite for art and the metaphorical (or virtual) dimension may reside in the etymology of 'metaphor', meaning 'to carry across' or 'bridge'.
Bjork's latest invention is also a kind of bridge. An online education platform, launched in early 2016, teaches students about the intersection between music and biology through technically innovative learning resources. http://bjork.com/ has been a hit in schools across the songstress' native Iceland, but is available to anyone with unrestricted internet access. On the 1st September, she released footage of the press conference for the 'Bjork Digital' exhibition in London, attending the event from Iceland in avatar form via live stream motion capture. Amidst the increased accessibility of the digital world, it is not only the artist but the common woman whose virtual self establishes her as an authoritative creator of modernity.