Dazed and Confused #55 ·· 06.1999 ·· 'Caution: The film you are about to watch deals with adult themes and contains startling originality from the outset.' It was a phone call that Chris Cunningham had been quietly hoping to receive for a while. As it happens, Bjork had just been biding her time, waiting for the right song before approaching the prodigiously talented young director for a video treatment. That song is "All Is Full of Love," the final single from Bjork's third solo album, Homogenic. A slow-burning, distorted beat draws the camera along bundled electricity cables, sweeping up to a bright, sterile chamber as the orchestration builds. From within this cold machinery a typically intense, gasping vocal picks up the melody. It is Bjork, but in electromechanical form, her white casing still being worked on by probing robot arms. This is a film about symbolism, imagery and ideas, not narrative. About encapsulating the spirit in which the song was originally written, rather than trying illustrate its meaning. "When I first heard the track I wrote down the words; 'sexual', 'milk', 'white porcelain' and 'surgery'," recalls Chris. His immediate association with sex was vindicated when Bjork arrived at his London office with a book of Chinese Kama Sutra prints as her only guiding reference. "I knew them and liked them, but I couldn't figure out how to keep the explicit sexuality and still make it broadcastable." The decision to base the film in industrial robotics solved that problem but presented the challenge of ensuring that the femininity and sensuality of the music was not lost. This meant overseeing every aspect of production: hand-building the robots and spending weeks after filming fine-tuning each movement and expression at his computer. It was worth it. He believes it's his best video yet. "It's a combination of several fetishes: industrial robotics, female anatomy and fluorescent light in that order," reveals Chris. "It was perfect, I got to play around with the two things I was into as a teenager: robots and porn."