17 September 2014
HOME, 2014
MUSIC VIDEO COLLABORATION BY HOLLY HERNDON AND METAHAVEN
Artwork: "Home"
Artists: Holly Herndon (music), Metahaven (video director)
Year: 2014
Co-produced by Lighthouse.
Part of: Improving Reality 2014
Press: Pitchfork - 'Home' Review
Pitchfork - Holly Herndon Breaks Up With Her Laptop
AQNB - Holly Herndon x Metahaven Review
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ABOUT THE WORK
Holly Herndon “breaks up” with intimate technology with this pioneering new song Home (2014) and music video featuring a “data rain” of symbols designed by Metahaven to create a kind of aesthetic outing of the NSA. Metahaven explains: "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.” The pair premiered the video at Improving Reality conference, as part of Lighthouse’s programme for Brighton Digital Festival 2014.
Holly Herndon says: “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."
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ABOUT THE ARTISTS
A familiar face at Lighthouse, Holly Herndon is a renowned American electronic music composer, musician and sound artist, engaging with real-world social issues at the leading-edge of contemporary practice.
Holly received her MFA in Electronic Music and Recording Media at Mills College. While at Mills she won the Elizabeth Mills Crothers Award for Best Composer in 2010 for her vocal generated piece 195. After completing her Ph.D. in Computer Music at Stanford University, she is now pursuing her international career – defined by her interest in working with not just other musicians, but also with artists, technologists and thinkers. Holly Herndon has released 3 full-length albums to international critical acclaim: Movement (2012), Platform (2015), and PROTO (2019).
Metahaven was founded in 2007 by Vinca Kruk and Daniel van der Velden and is based in Amsterdam. In 2013 they were awarded the Cobra Art Prize and named Design Studio of the Year by ICON magazine. Their work has been featured
in publications such as frieze, e-flux journal and New York Times Magazine and exhibited at MoMA PS1, the V&A, Yerba Buena Center of the Arts in San Francisco and Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw, among others.
As designers, artists and filmmakers they operate at the interface of aesthetics and geopolitics. In 2012, they designed a collection of scarves and T-shirts in support of WikiLeaks, whilst amongst their books, Uncorporate Identity (2010), unpicks the paradoxes of identity in a networked world, Can Jokes Bring Down Governments? (2013) proposes humour as the latest weapon of protest, and Black Transparency (2015) examines the right to know in an age of mass surveillance.
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ABOUT THE RELEASE
Home is released by RVNG and is available in audio and visual forms.
