The New Gods in the Machine: Holly Herndon’s Vehicularity

(2016)

The object – in its autonomy, its detachment from a larger system – has been an intellectual fetish item in recent times, whereas earlier, it was the nature of the system – its peregrinations, its sinister machinations – that held us captive. Arguably, not much has changed except for the directional flow of the analysis: many artists and thinkers retain the concern with the omniscient ‘outer’ frame and its embeddedness in our lives. But with technology playing a bigger role than ever before in mediating our quotidian transactions and affections, a bottom-up analysis has come to the fore: simultaneously considering the object qua object and as a means through which to critique its relations, or the systems to which it contributes.

The point of such critique is, naturally, to catalyse some change in the structural flows of such systems. But is critique enough? Does it necessarily act as a catalyst in an era when, owing to technology’s omniscience and the so-called global forum, everyone has a voice; when, now more than ever before, the old adage ‘Opinions are like assholes…’ rings accurate? Indeed, under such conditions, critique often seems like little more than necessary filler.

A third, activist approach might be located in the work of Holly Herndon. Herndon is a musician whose recent output has focussed on the considerable deployments of one particular object, the laptop; an item whose overloaded instrumentality nearly precludes – or at least, makes ridiculous – any notion of objectile autonomy. Through her ideas of embodiment, technology as extension of self, and an anti-escapist ethos, Herndon seeks ways for her laptop-produced music to ‘direct the conversation’, as she put it recently.[1]

Herndon cannot be considered a ‘pure’ musician – in the sense of being a composing and recording artist who also performs live concerts. To consider her in this traditional sense would be to exclude her academic activities, what one might call the research side of her practice, which have entailed a rigorous interrogation of the ontology of her chosen medium; it would also be a mistake to overlook the frequency and nature of her collaborations, which often extend her work beyond music’s established confines. Just as difficult is any attempt at considering her music ‘purely’, for it straddles the demarcation between ‘experimental’ music or sound art and the marketised machinery of pop. Herndon’s music, as well as the model of the artist she puts forth, is a new machine, representing a challenging means of looking at and interacting with the world – a means that is very much rooted in the perambulations of the ‘now’.