For the music video accompanying her latest single, Björk worked with long-time collaborators Andrew Thomas Huang and James Merry to create her vision of utopia.



The Gate is the first single from the Icelandic musician's new album Utopia, which is due out in November. It follows on from the musician's 2015 "break-up" album Vulnicura, which was written after she split with artist Matthew Barney.

The video, which Huang describes as the "first glimpse into Björk's utopia", picks up where Vulnicura left off.

It begins with Björk playing flute in a pasture, before moving into a cosmological world of fractal visuals and prismatic portals.

In it, two lovers pass a prism between their chests that represents love, which Björk says is not just "in the quotidian romantic sense but in a broader cosmological way."

"It's when the chest changes from a wound to a gate, where you can send and receive love from," Björk told Dezeen. "I was talking about prisms and how when one suffers trauma, one splits into different coloured parts and the only way to unite them is with love."

"Out of all the songs I've done, there hasn't been more connection between the sound and the visual and the lyric," she continued.

The movie was filmed as one continuous shot. Directors Huang and Merry brought on board animation studio Wolf and Crow, which modelled and created an avatar rig that was worn by dancer Leo Morimune, who plays the dancing figures in the video.

For her outfit, Bjork wore a Gucci dress designed by the brand's creative director Alessandro Michele, which she described as "a stubborn light beam of hope" in the middle of "a lot of darkness."

Huang first worked with Björk in 2012 on her Biophilia album, when he created a video named Mutual Core for the album's accompanying app.

"I am blessed to have a visual relationship with Andrew Thomas Huang and James Merry," Björk said. "Andrew is incredibly talented and I feel privileged to have for so long been involved with his creation, overwhelmed with gratitude and honoured to have been in his hands."

Björk's unique visual language has attracted a range of collaborations with designers, including Neri Oxman, who created a mask based on "digital interpretations" of her bone and tissue, and Maiko Takeda, who designed a spiky headpiece for an exhibition in Paris.