Holly Herndon Breaks Up With the NSA in Video for New Song "Home"

Holly Herndon has shared the video for “Home”, her “definitive NSA break up anthem.” The video was directed by the Dutch design studio Metahaven, and features Herndon singing as dozens of computer icons scroll past her. Watch it below. The track is out now via RVNG.

“Home” follows Herndon’s Chorus EP from earlier this year.

She also shared a statement about the song:

For my debut album Movement, I communicated an intimacy with my laptop. It is my instrument, memory, and window to most people that I love. It is my Home.

The ongoing NSA revelations have fundamentally changed this relationship. I entrusted so much in my device. To learn this intimacy had been compromised felt like a grand betrayal. Is everything done privately on my laptop to be considered a public performance?

In “Home”, I address that invisible audience. It is a love song for prying eyes (an agent / a critic), and also a break up song with the devices with which I shared a naive relationship. There is something dramatic, teenage and vulnerable to this sensation – our relationships with these interconnected devices are still so young, so naive.

As a culture, we are in a process of accelerated, and reluctant, maturation. We are attempting to reconcile the great emotional power of these technologies knowing that the more we welcome them into our lives, the more power they have to destabilize and hurt us.

Metahaven said of the video:

The video for “Home” provides a visual counterpart to Holly’s uneasy relationship with the NSA agent. The NSA spying on our network may have been tacitly known from reports going back as far as 2002, but the aesthetics of this surveillance were not so known. Code names, acronyms, icons and graphics from a shadow world designed to never be publicly exposed.

For “Home,” we created a data rain of these NSA symbols. The video sees Holly from two angles; one where she is facing the camera, singing, another where she is being photographed and appears as if under surveillance. This track grasps a balance between vulnerability and control.

Watch Holly Herndon discuss working with her laptop in an interview with Pitchfork.tv:

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