Artist James Merry: ‘It’s beautiful seeing tears coming out of the bottom of a VR headset’
Artist James Merry, 37, has been working with Björk since 2009; they were introduced by a mutual friend while Merry was studying ancient Greek at Oxford University. He moved to New York to work with her, and played a vital part in her 2011 album, Biophilia, on which each song was accompanied by an interactive app uniting concepts of music, science and nature. Merry has remained Björk’s right-hand man through her 2015 breakup album Vulnicura and this year’s Utopia, as well as making her elaborate masks and headpieces. Their latest project is a full virtual reality version of Vulnicura in which seven VR videos by different directors follow Björk’s path through heartbreak and recovery in the Icelandic landscape, from a verdant valley into a dark lava tube and out the other side. Merry lives and works in Iceland.
There’s a moment in the Family video where the Björk avatar seems to walk through the viewer – it’s quite unsettling.
Yes! When we were trying different builds of Notget with Nick Thornton Jones and Warren Du Preez, there were also moments when you were inside the avatar, and because I’m a semi-gamer, I was like: “Oooh! Oh no! It’s glitching, you can see inside it…” and Bjork was like: “Oh my God! This is amazing!” That’s one of my favourite moments, when that avatar in Family stands up and walks towards you, and you float through it and watch it walking away; it’s the most emotional part of the whole album I think.
See the full story here: https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2019/sep/21/bjork-james-merry-virtual-reality-vulnicura-album