Erstellt am: 21. 7. 2011 - 11:28 Uhr

Biophilia: The App

Björks app debut and a feeling of Déjà vu.

Let me begin this by saying I am a Björk fan. I just want you to know that what follows has nothing to do with any personal distaste for Björk or her work.

You can probably guess what's coming now.

Biophilia is Björks latest release. It's not just a collection of songs on plastic, it's a full blown concept featuring live shows, workshops, a website and an app for iDevices. It's being hyped as a revolutionary new approach to monetizing music. A visionary experiment in concept pop. A really cool app.

Biophilia is a free app. You can download it for the iPhone or the iPad and it's designed to take full advantage of the quirkier input possibilities of those devices. Swiping, tilting and twisting, pinch to zoom, it's all there. The developers have even garnered some geek points by creating a html5 based 3d engine to power the whole thing.

Once you have opened the app, you are greeted by the smooth voice of David Attenborough. He delivers an introduction to the project that starts out sounding like something from a BBC nature documentary and ends up sounding like he had spent some time hanging out with the ghost of Timothy Leary.

After that, you are on your own. It's expected that you will pinch and pull and swipe your way around the interface to discover the content that might be waiting. The major stuff is easy to find. It's marked with text and looks like bigger stars in the constellations. Available material is made obvious by a yellow glow around the star.

Zooming in to the only available glowing star brings you to what looks like a webpage. And that's where things begin to get annoying. Everything that's meant to provide information feels like a lo-fi website. It reminded me a lot of early attempts at web-art, and the content only reinforced that feeling. The texts explaining the works all sound like mid-90's media art manifestos. Those thirty page monologues hanging next to a lonely TV featuring a video loop of someone jumping on the bed. The text that tries to explain just how and why you are experiencing a revolutionary moment.

The free app is being described as a "Mother App". That's basically a nice way of saying it's a shop for you to buy Björk stuff. Although there are supposed to be easter eggs and hidden content that can be find by those dedicated enough to whoosh around the universe, the main content has to be purchased.

The tracks (if this were an album) are actually apps. Mini games so to speak. One is free, Cosmogeny. It's basically the intro to the whole thing and meant to whet your appetite for more. The only other one available at the time I played was Crystalline. It's been available as a track for a while now, but buying it in the app gets you a game, an animation more texts and the lyrics. It costs 1.59€.

That's one of the other problems with this thing. The tracks (or apps, or whatever) are more expensive than a single in iTunes, and more expensive than many of the most popular games. In the case of Crystalline that means you paid for a minigame that consists of navigating a series of tunnels collecting crystals while the song plays. Each crystal you collect is supposed to change the sound of the track, and you can collect and share these crystals with other people. I'm still not certain if that means you can share your remix or just a picture of the crystal, but the gameplay was so frustrating that I just didn't want to find out.

You also get an animated semi-interactive visual for the song. It was fun to look at once or twice, although hacing the lyrics dance in front of you the whole time leads to a critical confrontation with the lyrics and their meaning. That took a lot of the fun out of the song, since I kept having an image of an esoteric headcase in houseslippers in my head.

In the end you have a minigame that only offers minifun and an animated music track that you can only listen to in-game. If you want to actually enjoy Björks latest with the rest of your music collection you will still have to lay out the cash for the track.

The whole experience reminds me a lot of the interactive CD's that were making headlines in the mid 90's. They had a certain wow value the first few times you played them, but ultimately ended up being ignored. If the individual app pricing continues in the same vein, you will end up paying over 14 Euros for a collection of mini games and some animations. If you actually want to listen to the music, you're probably better off just buying the CD and reading her website.

You can fly around that too.