Björk is the Icelandic musician, actress and genuine renaissance women who has spent the best part of the last 30 years reinventing herself and her art to a degree that would make Madonna blush. Every album, tour or unique event undertaken by the woman whose albums can veer from industrial art rock and avant-garde electronica to full-blown musical theatre or folksy americana in the blink of an eye is approached as an opportunity to reinvent the wheel and push boundaries.
“Multi-material 3D printing enables the production of elaborate combinations of graded properties, distributed over geometrically complex structures within a single object” Neri Oxman
This year, moving her gaze towards the world of technology and design, she has partnered with designer and researcher Neri Oxman and her Mediated Matter group on a mask made up of multiple 3D-printed strands that mimic the underlying structure of her own face. The Rottlace mask, which made its debut during a performance in Tokyo last week, is based on digital interpretations of Björk's own bone and tissue taken from three-dimensional scans. The black and white design appears to resemble locks of hair laid on the musician's face, and extends below the chin to partially cover the neck. It looks more than a little terrifying in all honesty, but perhaps that's the point?
To create the Rottlace designs, the team first 3D scanned Björk’s head, resulting in a point cloud of curvature vectors. The team then modified the directional field to distinguish between the primary and secondary curvatures, assigning areas with a high degree of divergence as the rigid, bone-like support structure from which soft collagen fibres will emerge, emulating the connections between muscle and bone, bone and bone, and muscle and muscle, with differing degrees of weave density. At least a dozen mask designs were presented to Björk, who selected one to be printed for her live performance.
“I am blown away by Neri Oxman’s work. She is a true pioneer in capturing the biological with 3D printing in such a refined and profound way. It’s been a real joy to get to know her” Björk
The mask's name is a variation on the Icelandic word for skinless and was printed as a set of muscle textiles that allow Björk to move her face and neck unencumbered in the mask as she performs. The mask is the latest in a series of unusual headpieces worn by the musician, including a prickly, glow-in-the-dark design created by fashion designer Maiko Takeda. The piece was printed by additive manufacturing company Stratasys using a flexible, acrylic-based polymer and a special multi-material printing process, which allows for synthetic materials with specific mechanical properties to be distributed in a geometrically complex construction in a single printed object. The design is part of a larger mask collection called “The New Ancient,” which will be revealed later this year. Oxman has also experimented with the same process to print molten glass and (prepare to shudder) wearable skins.
The mask will accompany the singer on her Björk Digital series of events, which run until July 18 and also had an airing in Sydney last month. The opening event was also the world's first live performance broadcast using 360-degree virtual reality streaming, with the song “Quicksand” from her album “Vulnicura.” The event was held at the Miraikan, Japan’s National Museum of Emerging Science and Innovation, one day before the venue’s opening of the exhibition, which also includes a theatre outfitted with VR technology for audiences to experience music from Vulnicura and a cinema room to listen to 29 songs (newly remastered in 5.1-channel surround sound) from her back catalog.
