Her forthcoming songbook; photo by Stephen Sweet

At the same time you’re putting out a book, you’re also launching your traveling VR exhibit on the West Coast. It’s a time of anxiety about technology—robots stealing our jobs, nuclear war with North Korea, Trump’s tweets, social media exhaustion—but you’re diving right in.

I try to look at it as just as a tool. We've always had tools. We discovered how to work with fire, we made the first knife. The nuclear bomb comes and everybody's like, “Oh, well, we could actually kill everybody.” We had to go through the morality of it. And so we have to react to that [with technology]. I definitely do get anxious about it, but because I'm anxious about it, I try to come up with solutions. It's here: I'm not going to just put bananas in my ears and wait for it to go away. I'm probably most anxious about it when it comes to the planet and the environment. I feel guilty that I'm not just living in Iceland full-time, living on totally green energy and growing all my own vegetables. That's what we all should be doing. But I think the way to overcome environmental problems is with technology. What else are we going to use—sticks?

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.

It’s nice to hear someone sound hopeful at what feels like a hopeless moment.

I am obviously devastated about Trump, like everybody. I was a mess for weeks after, especially when it comes to the environment. But I'm watching people online reorganizing themselves, and you have to swallow the brutal pill that the government is not going to save the planet. We have to do it. I'd like to dare people like Bill Gates, to give them like two years to clean the oceans. They have the money and the tech know-how to do it—somebody just needs to organize it.

Where would you like to see VR and music go?

Right now, it's most prevalent in the gaming industry. I like that it doesn’t seem to be going in an elitist way. I think it's going to end up being as available as an iPhone. It's immersive, and anything that's creative is a positive thing. With music, from my point of view, VR is a continuation of the music video. Anybody who likes sound like me is going to be into 360-degree sound and vision. And what's exciting about VR is that right now it doesn't have the hierarchy of patriarchy. There are so many girls in it. I shot seven or eight VR videos now, worked with seven or eight different teams, and there's a lot of girls out there. I'm hoping that that will kind of come to mirror the time that we're in, where boys and girls are more equal.

You’ve been in retrospective mode, to some degree, with the MoMA exhibit and now these projects. Do you ever get wistful or nostalgic about your own past work?