Bjork, my savior

We just have to define technology. There's no one answer. Sometimes you have to burn yourself. Maybe there are a lot of kids now who don't know how to walk in a forest and do basic outdoorsy things. You can be on Facebook for a long time, and then you get a feeling in your body like you've had three hamburgers. You know it's trash. I always advise my friends: just go for a walk for an hour and come back and see how you feel then. I think we're meant to be outdoors. I was brought up in Iceland, and even if it was snowing or raining, I would be outdoors all day. Entertain yourself. Do shit. I think we need to put humanity into technology—the soul. It's about using technology to get closer to people, to be more creative.

You work meticulously across almost every artistic aspect of your career. How do you juggle all of them?

A big part of it is I've just done it for a long time. If you publish your first book, maybe you wouldn't be bothered by the paper, but three books later, you might say, “Actually, I do care about the paper and the font.” As time goes, you get opinions on how to do things. In the beginning, when I was punk bands back in Iceland, I was really dogmatic that it was all about the music. You're not supposed to care about how you dress, your hair—that was all superficial. Very strict. But then you see four photos of you—not that you're ugly or you’re pretty—but it's just not representative of the song you wrote. Five years into it, you go, “Wait a minute, I met this guy at the bar and he does photos, I think he understands.” And then you do photos together. It's gradual.

Do you think you're better at what you do now than you've ever been?

I don’t know. I look at it like this: You're in orbit around a moon, and age just means you’re always looking at the same thing but from a different point of view. To be able to not be shot out of orbit, you have to be really careful about getting rid of any luggage that isn’t relevant and will weigh you down.

First you discover the tool, then it’s like meeting a new friend, and then you can try and figure where the magic happens, where the most potential is to grow. It’s that heat point, and that feeling of entering the unknown, that really excites me.

I love the feeling of entering the unknown. You have to allow yourself a lot of mistakes, and then when you get it right, it’s so rewarding. 

Do you see VR as something that removes you from the natural world or do you see it as something that folds into reality?

I think it’s both. I think it’s binary, and I think that’s almost the point. If you try to escape one thing and just do one or the other, you’re always going to end up at the same point. I don’t know if that makes sense, but it sort of eats its own tail. It’s always going to be that question, for sure, but I’m sure that was the same question people had with everybody on trains reading books or commuting or whatever. It’s always going to be, are they here with us in the train, or are they somewhere else in their book? I don’t think this is any different. There are obviously different challenges with this, though.

I heard somebody say that he watched some crazy game, for like eight hours a day, that had the wrong physics in it—like all the distances to the mountains or whatever didn’t add up. So, what happened after a few days, is first he would get seasick when he was in the machine, and then he would actually get used to it. Then when he would take the machine off him, he would get seasick. He had to put it back on to not throw up. That’s obviously very scary. Then with anything, you have to work out things like the soul and humanity, and what’s good for you, and not be lazy. These good old ethics can come back. To not get addicted.