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| Holly Hernon, Chorus, video still |
The video for Holly Herndon’s Chorus, (2014 release by RVNG) is possibly one of the visually freshest things I have seen lately. Directed by Akihiko Taniguchi and using a custom 3D software program it takes you into a virtual realm but it is much more then that. It is more a reflection of the currency of this time while also being an archetypal reflection of what it is to be human.
The video
begins in a clear-lens video shot of Herndon. She is distinct looking with her red braided hair and sky
blue eyes. The video then starts
to digitize her in a transitory way, but it does not seem
transformative. It is just a sense
of becoming. The video then
proceeds to take you deeper into a black space. This space can be a number of things. The internet, the subconscious, the
void, the matrix, it is zero-gravity and black but it does not feel like a
place of entrapment but more like a place of alternate possibility.
The vocals and
the music of Chorus
is key to the visuality or maybe this is vice versa, the visuality responds
distinctly to the music. The edits
shift and punctuate in cuts and syncing that matches and converges with the
song. The music and vocals are
like a broken chant but one that is in mid-air shatter versus collapse. It sounds like vibrations going back
and forth in a space that have yet to land. Listening to the song on headphones emphasis this bouncing
effect with brain massage reverb.
As the video
progresses you see workstations with computers and laptops. It is clear that these are real desks
and you get a sense of whoever it is by the clutter, the objects and the
miscellaneous evidence of living and working there. Taniguchi said he asked friends for stills of their workspaces
and it is what he does to them is what makes this video so fresh to see. The desks have a free floating
formation and they have an effect on them that feels like they are preserved in
some sort of gel, epoxy, plastic but it also feels like some sort of primordial
ooze that is simultaneously freezing, preserving and overtaking these
spaces. The relic/preservation
element of this effect makes you focus on the state of our technology and the
personal implications and sites of using it.
A computer, the
desk, a person sitting at a desk is a portal that lets us expand, communicate,
create, connect and view. The
physically singular, flat, plane of the computer screen is made infinite in its
function as portal. Taniguchi
presents these sites of this act; through one looking at their own screen, but
he shows the physical-ness of this site even as it is floating, isolated and
captured.
The swirling,
swiveling and rotating of these spaces in addition to what feels like glitch
confetti of Japanese knick knacks gives a feeling of lightness and joy even with
the stimulation of decay or entombment of the desk surfaces. Herndon’s music also has this touch of
lightness. It feels like it is
thrusting you through a traveling space and at the end, Herndon is a replicate
of herself in front of her own work station but this feels natural for her to be
there like this.
Issues of
technology, the body, the personal zone of creation and interaction are all
topics that will continue to be discussed and doctoralized upon. Our integration with the virtual is
different then it has ever been before but this is how things always are, how
they always feel. What is
brilliant and captivating about Chorus as a song and as a video is that it evokes this discord but
jumps into it without answer. It
embraces, lets go and in that it shows the beauty and the possibilities of the
state of living.
