A meditation on laptop intimacy in the wake of revelations about the NSA.

As widely reported, Holly Herndon made her laptop the focal point of her debut album Movement: “It is my instrument, memory, and window to most people that I love. It is my Home.”

Her new single ‘Home’ (out now via RVNG Intl.) explores the changing relationship with her laptop in the wake of ongoing revelations about NSA spying. “To learn this intimacy had been compromised felt like a grand betrayal,” she writes. “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.”

The video was directed by Amsterdam firm Metahaven, and features Herndon both as performer and surveillance subject amid a “data rain of … NSA symbols.”

“As a culture, we are in a process of accelerated, and reluctant, maturation,” concludes Herndon. “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.”