Sound Art · 2026-06-29
Björk the sound artist: from Biophilia to the soundscapes of MoMA
A German cultural profile presents Björk as an artist working on the border of pop and the avant-garde; her output — especially Biophilia and the 2015 MoMA retrospective — pushes the limits of pop music towards sound art (Klangkunst).
The Icelandic singer-composer's shaping of sound has long been more than pop music: unusual time signatures, complex vocal arrangements, synthesisers, and imagery binding nature to technology. The 2011 Biophilia was a multimedia project — with apps and custom instruments (a gameleste, a "gravity harp," a Tesla coil) — that turned natural phenomena (gravitation, DNA) into music.
That this is genuinely the sound-art line is confirmed by the 2015 MoMA retrospective in New York: the Biophilia instruments played in the museum lobby, "Black Lake" was an immersive sound-and-film installation in a room lined with 8,000 sound-absorbing pyramids, and "Songlines" was a location-based sonic journey through Björk's career. The Biophilia app was the first app to enter MoMA's collection — a sign that here music, design and digital technology become the tools of sound art. (Sources: Ad-hoc-news.de; Museum of Modern Art)
Sources: Ad-hoc-news.de · Museum of Modern Art · MoMA — "Biophilia, the First App in MoMA's Collection"
This article was machine-composed under human supervision.