Hyperballads and hyperlinks
How a Toronto web design company helped Björk realize her latest online vision.
BY: JENNY CHARLESWORTH
The remnants of a recent brainstorming session are splashed across the IdeaPaint-coated walls of Liberty Village new-media studio Jam3. Six months ago, the cryptic equations and rushed shorthand would have been engulfed in a constellation of marker points as studio partners Mark McQuillan and Adrian Belina, along with Pablo Vio, worked furiously with their developers to give Björk’s website an intergalactic facelift.
“We received a video of what they wanted it to look like,” says McQuillan of Jam3’s first dealings with the international team spearheading the ambitious project for the Icelandic pop princess. “Björk was looking for a site to match the creative around her biophilia project, which involves an album, videos, apps for each track, and really explores organic form and nature in a highly stylized fashion. But [Google SketchUp], the technology they used to create that video, doesn’t have a clear exporting path [to the web], so it was next to useless. We had to put on our sleuthing caps and basically figure out how we were going to get it from A to Z.”
“Z” is where Björk fans can navigate through a 3-D solar system to explore the superstar’s musical output and learn about her forward-thinking biophilia concept (the re-launched website is the first phase of the multi-disciplinary endeavour). And getting there meant pushing the creative envelope with HTML5, a technology that Vio kindly demystifies for those not altogether tech savvy, describing it as “a fancy new HTML for being able to animate pages.” Apple bossman Steve Jobs has endorsed it as an alternative to Flash.
Jam3 has established itself as a leader in the digital storytelling realm after eight years of award-winning work. (The dozen or so accolades on display in its foyer are hard to miss, unless, of course, your gaze first falls upon the prized Street Fighterarcade game.) They acknowledge that landing this latest VIP client has a lot to do with the fact they actively encourage their developers to experiment. In fact, it was an experiment in HMTL5 “thrown up” on the Jam3 labs blog that caught the attention of Björk’s management team at One Little Indian Records, which was canvassing for a studio that could effectively execute the creative vision she had developed with French design partnership M/M (Paris).
“She’s very involved,” says McQuillan, who admits to snapping a photo of himself while on a Skype conference call with Björk. “She’s not one of those artists who has her management take care of a lot of things. She’s detail-orientated and is a participant in all of her creative activities across the entire spectrum of her work.”
With the innovative site—which is viewable on most browsers, though it works best on Google Chrome—now launched, Jam3 is proud to be in the spotlight. “It was a unique challenge and it’s drawn a lot of eyes,” says Belina. “One, it’s Björk. Two, it’s unique to anything online. And three, it’s drawn a lot of attention from the technical community because it’s among the first large projects to be done in HTML5 with this degree of technical difficulty.”
For a company that sees its clients as its sales staff and a credible voice to promote its industrious efforts both in the technical and creative worlds, Jam3 has done well to land a global icon such as Björk. Her revolutionary spirit would surely clash with any team not driven by the same zest for pioneering, so this new tie is quite a coup for the Toronto studio. (McQuillan hints at the website’s continued evolution, along with more biophilia-related output courtesy of his studio.) It also bodes well for McQuillan and his partners to land a Björk meet-and-greet backstage when her fantastical biophilia tour finally winds through town.
—Published July 13 in The Grid
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