Reaching only £15,370 of its £375,000 goal and with less than three weeks to go before completion deadline, quirky electronic music chanteuse Bjork has decided to cancel the Kickstarter campaign for her Biophilia mini-app.
Bjork's "Biophilia Team" apologized in a letter written to their backers by stating, "Seems like the costs were too gigantic and we too optimistic, so it seemed cleverest to pause it for now. "
Referring to "things seem[ing] to change fast" and the fact the Team anticipates there being, possibly in the future, "a far cheaper way to reprogram this," the message concludes with the hopeful statement, "We are still looking at ways of making this happen so send your email address to kickstarter@bjork.com and we'll keep you posted when there's any new developments."
The project, which can be seen in this demo video, features a mini-app that accompanies each of the ten songs from the same-named album released in October 2011.
Noting in the video that the app was initially put out on iPhones and iPods, the fey singer explained that "the dream was always to make it available on all smart phones and all touch screens.This is a dream we haven't been able to fulfill yet."
The app - and therefore, directly, the aborted Kickstarter campaign itself - was a facet of Bjork's Biophilia educational program that she hopes will expand workshops that have already run in Iceland into the States and elsewhere. Said workshops involve engaging/educating children viz. "the intersection of art, science, nature, and technology."
"The Icelandic workshops took place over four weeks, teaching 60 students ages 10-12," reported Pitchfork.
"The Biophilia app suite offered a starting point. Students engaged in activites [sic]ranging from playing with Björk's custom instruments to extracting DNA from an onion to watching the division of a cell on a flat-screen television."
Biophilia itself is the eighth full-length record by Bjork and was "partly recorded" on an iPad. In collaboration with Apple, it was released as a series of apps, making it as such the "world's first app album."
Receiving mostly positive reviews, the album - which Bjork called a multimedia collection "encompassing music, apps, Internet, installations, and live shows" - debuted at number 27 on the U.S. Billboard 200.
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