Björk has been feeling a little sensitive about her visual collaborations lately. It’s not that she isn’t proud of them, but she worries sometimes that the visual element of her work overshadows the music, her life’s obsession. “It wasn’t so much that I was really ambitious to do the best visuals in the universe,” she explained. “It was more that I burnt myself on spending a lot of time doing music and then seeing visuals accompanying them that just didn’t fit that music at all.”

Björk, now 49, spent her teens and early 20s immersed in the collective do-it-yourself ethos of Iceland, where “if someone else wanted to put out a record we would just make the poster by hand.” She made a record of folk songs at 11, then found punk as a teenager, but she was, in pop music terms, a late bloomer when she diverged to what she describes as the “matriarch energy” of electronic beats — the effeminate, queer, culturally diverse heritage of underground dance music. In the late 1980s, as a singer in the postpunk band the Sugarcubes in Reykjavik, Björk began secreting albums by 808 State and Public Enemy, teaching herself about a musical lineage that ran from Kraftwerk to Detroit techno and on into England, to Kate Bush, Brian Eno and Warp Records. It’s only a two-and-a-half hour flight from Iceland to London, so that’s where she moved with her young son at the age of 27. It was 1993, early in a new technological era. She was a single mom with an interest in solitary endeavor, intrigued by what she’d seen in some nightclubs in Manchester. “It was really difficult for me to be that selfish,” she would later recall.

The move from the provincial to the global, from the charming mess of homegrown collaboration to the unknown possibilities of a career as a soloist in a newer genre of music, was also her declaration of independence from the macho vernacular of rock ’n’ roll. (You may have noticed that Björk, who has used a Tesla coil as an instrument, has all but ignored the electric guitar.) From then on, “mostly it was my songs and my vision, and I would decide what would be in which song and when.” Going forward, she would express her vision clearly to her collaborators, and choose them with great care.

As she finished her first solo album, “Debut,” she saw a music video by a French band called Oui Oui on television. She contacted its director, a young filmmaker named Michel Gondry. They talked about their hippie parents and the Russian folk tales they had watched as children, and he directed the fairy-tale video for “Human Behavior,” her first music video as a solo artist. From then on, each album doubled as a nexus of deviation through which Björk exposed popular audiences to often-obscure fashion designers, filmmakers and, later, when she made her first app for 2011’s “Biophilia,” computer programmers.

Unlike David Bowie, who created an alter ego, or Madonna, whose visual transformations always have a mocked-up, storyboarded feeling, Björk tailored her collaborations to the specificity of each song, to the character and story that she wanted to convey. When she worked with the director Chris Cunningham, who directed the robot-sex video for “All Is Full of Love,” she told him the song was about where love and lust meet, and showed him ivory statues from Asia that he translated into his own melancholic vision. To invoke the scale of “Biophilia” on tour, she wore dresses from an Iris van Herpen collection inspired by photographs of micro-organisms. “It’s creating a whole universe and not only creating the music,” said van Herpen. “She really knows what she wants.”