Holly Herndon isn’t the first musician to voice her concerns about state surveillance in song form, but her statement may be the most overt. On ‘Home’, from her 2015 album Platform, she sings directly to the unseen figure that she knows is watching her – not with their eyes, not with cameras, but with access to her email inbox.
As Herndon explains it, her intimate attachment to her phone and laptop had turned her inbox into a virtual “home” – but that attachment left her feeling violated after the revelation that the NSA, the US government agency tasked with gathering electronic intelligence, had been surveying the population on a mass scale, collecting telephone records of millions of Americans and tapping directly into Facebook and Google servers.
Shuddering at the thought of an unknown intelligence officer invading her inbox, Herndon wrote 'a love song for prying eyes' that’s also 'a break-up song with the devices with which I shared a naive relationship.' For the video, she called in regular collaborators Metahaven, a Dutch design studio whose work often explores democracy, corporate identity and the internet. Looking directly at the camera, so that the viewer takes on the role of the NSA snoop, Herndon wonders about the process that has paired her with this unseen presence: 'I can feel you in my room / Why was I assigned to you?' As the chorus kicks in, her face is obscured by hundreds of logos falling like rain, all taken from leaked PowerPoint presentations circulated within the NSA. 'I think that really revealed the human touch behind these programs,' she explained to NPR. 'They have really goofy cartoon characters and shapes and so it really shows the kind of humanity — the human fault behind these very real massive programs.'