Pop Music: Machine Yearning

Holly Herndon’s search for a new art form for our tech obsessions.

Hua Hsu

The artist and scholar Holly Herndon describes the laptop as “the most intimate instrument that we’ve ever seen.” It doesn’t just facilitate the creation of art—it’s a device that connects us to the world, a surface that’s as familiar as our own flesh, a thing that we entrust with our secrets and memories, a machine that we fall asleep cradling. Herndon makes experimental pop music, the result of tinkering and testing, as she chases ideas about the tech-obsessed present. That her experiments occasionally produce songs that are club-friendly can feel like an accident, a bug rather than a feature. In 2015, Herndon released “Platform,” an album that contemplates surveillance by sampling the sounds of everyday life—a refrigerator door, a Skype session. On the track “Home,” an unconventional breakup song, she…

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The New Yorker (Digital) - 1 Issue, May 20, 2019

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