‘Digital Witness’: How St Vincent channelled the angst of ‘Her’
The digital world seems to be a constant contradiction. St Vincent tries to talk about these contradictions in her self-titled album on the track ‘Digital Witness’. It’s a difficult topic to put into song, but she tackles it incredibly well on the track, highlighting the fact that with the increased connection of technology also comes an amount of disconnection.
Social media doubles up as one of the best and worst inventions in modern times. On the one hand, it’s nice to connect with friends and family, as they remain close to us despite physical distance. It has also created many jobs for people, allows creatives to promote their work without incurring large costs and encourages different forms of creativity.
On the other hand, we are heavily addicted to social media, to the point that it can be difficult for many people to step away from it. Everything that we do in our lives is documented through social media; otherwise, it hasn’t happened. As a result, in pursuit of establishing a better social connection, we have become more disconnected. This forms the premise of St Vincent’s track.
“A lot of the record touches on this digital reality of total connection and total lack of connection, where it feels like every day is an episode of Black Mirror,” she said, “This record is me trying to figure out how to navigate that malaise.”
This idea of disconnection in the fact of technology also forms a large part of the 2013 film Her. The movie is a science-fiction romance in which a lonely man develops a relationship with an AI interface that talks to him. He becomes obsessed with the technology voice, and the relationship develops into something both steamy and emotionally dependent. There seem to be genuine feelings on display even though half of the relationship doesn’t actually exist in the physical world.
This real-life dependency on something that doesn’t exist in real life is an exciting concept surrounding our modern attachment to social media. We are fixated on a digital image and obsessed with this idea of being connected through the medium of the internet that the idea of being connected in reality falls by the wayside. This exists both in the form of being addicted to posting what you’re doing with your time on social media and also forming connections with people that you might have never met and maybe never will meet.
In this sense, the themes that dominate both ‘Digital Witness’ and Her overlap. While Her doesn’t focus a great deal on the use of social media, the idea of connections through digital means protrudes. It’s interesting to experience both pieces of art in short succession as themes run along from one another. They are huge concepts to tackle in art, but St Vincent and Spike Jonze do great jobs of bringing those ideas to life in an entertaining way.
