For Björk, a video is not a promotional necessity, but a graceful tool to ease the passage of her music into your brain. “It functions as a shortcut,” she’s said. “Most people’s eyes are more mature than their ears. Some songs perhaps need a dozen listens to sink in. With a visual, it will sometimes take only one or two takes—as long as there is synchronicity between the two.”

Looking back through her career, you can see that synchronicity between sound and vision, and between the available technology and her ambition, growing ever stronger over time. Music videos, in the hands of one of its most imaginative innovators, become not just packaging, but a part of the song itself. Here are 10 of her grandest leaps forward.

“Human Behaviour” (1993)

This faux-naive fairytale set the tone for Björk’s early visual era, as she romped in the dark, dark woods alongside a rampant teddy and dancing moths. She asked director Michel Gondry for the bear, natural textures like wood and leaves, and an effect that mimicked animation. Björk described the end result as “an animal’s point of view on humans,” in a 1995 Rolling Stone interview, “and the animals are definitely supposed to win in the end.” But the video was also a little bit about her childhood, which echoed that of Gondry in its combination of hippie and scientific influences (courtesy of her electrician father and Gondry’s inventor grandfather). This wouldn’t be the last time Björk sided with the bears—or indeed the moths, who here (as well as later in the song “Isobel” and the virtual reality video for “Notget”) are symbols of instinct.

“Hyperballad” (1995)

Spike Jonze’s technicolor musical-style clip for “It’s Oh So Quiet” was the most MTV-successful video from Björk’s second album Post; “Ren and Stimpy” creator John Kricfalusi’s rampant fantasia for “I Miss You” the weirdest. “Hyperballad,” though, was the biggest evolution for Björk and Gondry. It tries to unite the same seeming opposites as Post: the city and nature, modern technology and the human body. When Björk told Gondry the song’s story—about a woman in a relationship who releases inner frustrations by visiting a clifftop and committing small acts of ritual destruction—he “imagined her being dead and alive at the same time.” Using motion control technology, Gondry compiled shots of Björk’s face appearing dead, footage of model cliffs, and a video-game-style Björk avatar onto one film in 14 exposures. “I liked the idea that there was a good chance that it could all go wrong,” said Gondry.

“Hunter” (1997)

For the sleeve of “Army of Me,” London design agency Me Company turned Björk into an Astro Boy–inspired character, NovaBjörk, who had a polar bear sidekick called WhiteHeat. “I identify with polar bears,” she said at the time. “They’re very cuddly and cute and quite calm, but if they meet you they can be very strong.” For “Hunter,” her first video with Me (who’d overseen her artwork for years), Björk finally let out her inner bear. Her face and a model polar bear head were filmed separately then animated together with Me Company’s designs (then the cutting edge of computer 3D modeling) by L Digital Domain studio, which had recently finished work on Titanic. The original idea was to show full-body transformations of Björk to bear, but the cost proved too high. Just the face is enough: Björk’s expressions flit between playful and pained, aggressive and ecstatic. Sometimes she seems to try to shake off the ridges of digital fur sprouting from her skull, other times to gleefully will the transformation forward.

“All Is Full of Love” (1999)

Director Chris Cunningham made his name with Aphex Twin’s “Come to Daddy,” but he had started out doing prosthetic, model, and concept-drawing work on films like Alien 3 and Judge Dredd—a background he brings to Homogenic’s most romantic moment. “I told him that this song is sort of about where love and lust meet,” Björk remembered. “It’s sort of like heaven. It’s quite erotic. But it’s in heaven so everything has to be white.” She bought Cunningham miniature Chinese erotic sculptures and Kama Sutra prints to illustrate her vision. “When I first heard the track I wrote down the words ‘sexual,’ ‘milk,’ ‘white porcelain,’ ‘surgery,’” he said. A week or two later, he sent her a treatment: “It is like Kama Sutra meets Industrial Robotics.” The video ran months over deadline and was released almost two years after Homogenic, but Björk’s patience in trusting Cunningham’s vision was rewarded: “All Is Full of Love” now sits in MoMA’s permanent collection.

“Hidden Place” (2001)

Björk envisioned Vespertine’s “Hidden Place” as an homage to the small paradises people create within our dull world simply by uniting. Picking up on that idea of transmuting the mundane into magic, Dutch fashion photographers Inez and Vinoodh and Paris design agency M/M tried to “extend the usual time frame of pop video super-fast editing, to make it hypnotizing, mesmerizing and irritating, like an eternally burning fireplace.” Shots of liquids pouring over a mask are spliced together with extreme close-ups of Björk’s face, creating the surreal image of multi-hued liquids passing through her eyes, nose, and mouth as she sings. The imagery was inspired by poissons nageurs, a trick employed in 19th-century French brothels in which, after oral sex, a woman re-emits semen through her nose—fitting given Vespertine’s sublime eroticism.

“Pagan Poetry” (2001)

Björk’s second collaboration with photographer Nick Knight and designer Alexander McQueen marks an important point in her ongoing negotiation between staying private and using her life as raw material. And never rawer than here: the boundaries of pain and pleasure are explored through close-up images of volunteers being pierced, cut with blurred and manipulated images of penetration and oral sex. Björk was in a then-new relationship with artist Matthew Barney when she asked Knight to make a film about her love life: “I merely gave it back to her and said ‘film your love life,’” Knight said. In the more standard singing shots, Björk wears a topless McQueen creation, a bridal gown sewn into the skin, rich with pearls, themselves the product of bodily emission—dress as dirty romance, a union so complete that it hurts. Unsurprisingly, the video did not get MTV play.

“Wanderlust” (2008)

For this song, inspired by her time living on a houseboat, Björk commissioned a video whose ambition rose to meet Volta’s globally minded, political spirit. It was directed by Encyclopedia Pictura, who first came to attention with their captivatingly strange video for Grizzly Bear’s “Knife.” Inventive eco-living types, EP had designed their own 3D camera rig inspired by a turn-of-the-century stereopticon, which was used on “Wanderlust” along with puppetry, live action, scale models, stop-motion animation, and CGI. Björk travels down a river on the back of a yak, struggling with a clay double (actually a professional dancer) before they come face to face with the river’s god—apparently an “attempt at creating mytho-poetic cosmology of a primitive world,” according to Encyclopedia Pictura’s Isaiah Saxon.

“Mutual Core” (2012)

Commissioned by MOCA, the “Mutual Core” video marks the start of Björk’s ongoing collaboration with Andrew Thomas Huang, whose short film Solipsist had drawn her attention (and echoes similar themes as the song). Björk gave Huang a color palette to work with, which he filled out by studying geological collections in London museums. The real rock and sand used for the video were collected in Iceland, while the playful rock spirits are crafted from foam covered with plaster and encrusted with barnacles, with hungrily licking tongues added in CGI. “I like using practical effects and puppetry as much as I can,” Huang said. “If it’s too digital, it feels dead.” For the magma that erupts from earth goddess Björk’s mouth, she had to spit out a mixture of ketchup and cake batter, later superheated via CGI.

“Black Lake” (2015)

In the video for Homogenic’s “Jóga,” Björk had Gondry fly over Iceland’s wilderness in a helicopter, shooting images to be animated together digitally. “We didn’t even know if it would work,” Gondry later said. Almost 20 years later, Björk, Huang, and creative software wizards Autodesk went back to that wilderness to push the technical envelope once more, using drones to shoot every few meters in HD and 3D-printing models of Icelandic moss. The advance of technology to meet Björk’s vision—an ongoing theme of her visual career—allows for a smoother flow between CGI, landscape, and audio, together illuminating Vulnicura’s cathartic crisis. The setting is especially significant: “Black Lake,” the darkest point on an album documenting her split from Matthew Barney, was both written in a ravine and performed here in a ravine. On the giant screens at the ongoing Björk Digital exhibition, the connection was gut-punch palpable. “So physical it makes my insides rumble,” was Björk’s verdict.

“The Gate” (2017)

After Vulnicura, Björk found herself drawing colorful characters in her notebook. “Apparently it’s common when people have shocks, they kind of split into different colors, and then the way to heal it is to unite them into one point,” she explained. The spectrum of personality, unified through the rainbow prism of love, becomes the key image for “The Gate,” directed by Huang and featuring a sublime dress by Gucci’s Alessandro Michele and masks by James Merry. As with “Pagan Poetry,” perhaps the most moving moment comes at the starkest point: as the instruments drop out and Björk sings the line, “Didn’t used to be so needy/Just more broken than normal,” the focus glitches, shimmering from gauzy to distorted to sharp. The quiet moment of doubt makes it all the more miraculous when the chorus returns, the lovers resume passing their prism, and when Björk, astride her man, saucily sucks her thumb: sex in heaven, just like in “All Is Full of Love.” It’s a beautiful, bold declaration of renewed faith and, as always with Björk, hope for future evolution.

Emily Mackay is the author of the new 33 ⅓ book on Björk’s Homogenic.