Björk brings non-linearity to the text of music

Icelandic musician and artist Björk has released her latest album Biophilia as an iPad app. Every song, and the album itself, has levels of interactivity integrated into the music, text, sound and visualizations. Users are able to interrupt, distort or add to the songs as they play. While much of our reading has focused on using hypertext to distort the linearity of text, this application allows for the distortion of the linearity of music - seemingly a first for a world-wide popular and successful professional musician.

Bjork describes the project well in terms of how it uses hypertext to allow for interaction. "Much of nature is hidden from us, that we can neither see nor touch, such as the one phenomena that is said to move us more than any other in our daily lives: sound," she says on the front page of her website Bjork.com. "With Biophilia comes a restless curiousity, an urge to investigate and discover the illusive places where we meet nature. So too can we use technology to make visible much of what is not visible in our natural world."

This type of installation seems to be right in line with the notion of stereographic plurality discussed by Marsch. He says, "creative hypermedia installations combine at least two (for now) modes of sense experience: sight and sound" (paragraph 10). While I enjoyed Ankerson and Sapnar's Cruising and it does elicit a sense of stereographic plurality, I'm not sure whether it qualifies as non-linear. Espen Aarseth says, "A nonlinear text is a work that does not present its scriptions in one fixed sentence, whether temporal or spatial. Instead, through cybernetic agency (the user[s], the text, or both), an arbitrary sequence emerges" (p. 767). While there are many ways to play with how the user experiences Cruising, I would suggest that no manipulation results in an alternative sequencing.

Here are some videos that help illustrate what is being done by Bjork in Biophilia:

My introduction to nonlinear novels

In my undergrad, I was introduced to postmodern art and literature during an English class. After reviewing classics such as Heartof Darkness and best-sellers such as Toni Morrison’s Beloved, my professor described a novel that was composed of a set of loose pages contained in a box. Readers could begin reading the non-linear novel by picking up any page and could shuffle them into a new order at any point. This unstructured narrative struck a chord for me. How could you read a book like that? Would you be able to understand it? Was it written differently because of its format? I was instantly intrigued.

Although I regularly skip to the final chapter of a book to learn what happens, I still return to the section and continue reading, secure in my knowledge that my favourite characters would survive. But to start a story in the middle and then try to piece it together piece-by-piece seemed like an interesting challenge. Sadly, I lost the name of the novel. 

Now that I’m learning more about nonlinear writing, I searched out the book he mentioned. As far as I can tell, the book was Composition No. 1 by Marc Saporta. Composition No. 1 is written on 150 pages that are three-quarters filled with text. As noted on this article “Maybe You Should Start Again” from 3:AM Magazine, “each page is both in a sense complete in itself and part of a larger narrative that unfolds differently for each reader depending on the order of the pages,” (p. 1). The author explains that The Unfortunates where the random nature of the middle portions replicate the fragmentary nature of memory and make little difference what order they are read.