“The Call”: Serpentine Debuts Holly Herndon & Mat Dryhurst’s Pioneering Exhibition

Art Meets AI: The artists address current societal concerns with AI and platform participating choirs from across the UK

Serpentine presents The Call, the first UK solo exhibition of Berlin-based artists and musicians Holly Herndon and Mat Dryhurst, two of the most influential artists working with artificial intelligence today. Presented at Serpentine North from 4 October 2024 to 2 February 2025, the exhibition will address current societal concerns with AI, and platform musical ensembles from across the UK in a participatory experience for the public.

Serpentine Arts Technologies’ commitment to understanding the ways in which artists interrogate and experiment with AI systems has been integral since the department’s inception in 2014. Major AI projects that have emerged from the programme include Cécile B Evans (2014-2019), Ian Cheng (2018), James Bridle (2016 – 2021), Jenna Sutela (2019), Pierre Huyghe (2018 – 2019), Hito Steyerl (2019), Daisy Ginsberg (2022 – 2024) and Refik Anadol (2024). All these pioneering projects have bridged the virtual with the physical worlds.

Centred on the collective creation of new vocal datasets, governance frameworks and polyphonic AI models, The Call positions the process of data collection and AI model-training as artmaking. This results in an experience of human and machine voices in which the audience becomes entwined with, and at times part of, the choir.

For Herndon and Dryhurst, AI is to be approached as a ‘coordination technology’. For millennia, group singing and its associated techniques, such as call and response, have been rituals for mass communication, enabling us to build spaces and structures for gathering, processing, transmitting information, and creating meaning in social and civic life.

“If all media is training data, including art, let’s turn the production of training data into art instead.” – Holly Herndon & Mat Dryhurst

Navigating today’s AI systems requires similar coordination. A central component of the exhibition are newly commissioned choral AI models trained in collaboration with choirs throughout the UK. To train the AI models, Herndon and Dryhurst composed a songbook of hymns and singing exercises which were sung by fifteen ensembles and captured by a multi-channel recording protocol as part of a choral dataset tour in Spring 2024, from Belfast to Leeds, from Bristol to Beith, and many other cities.

The Call will both show how AI can enhance the power and artistry of the voice, and envisage new cultural, legal, and technical methods necessary to build AI systems collaboratively and ethically.

About Holly Herndon and Mat Dryhurst

Known for their pioneering work in music, machine learning, and ‘protocol development,’ Berlin-based artists Holly Herndon (US) and Mat Dryhurst’s (UK) expansive practice has led to precedent-setting projects where the technical systems that underwrite creative output are artworks unto themselves. Holly+ (2021), an AI clone of Herndon’s voice which can be used by anyone, has acted as a counter narrative to AI extractivism, offering artists a way forward in the wake of generative AI. Herndon and Dryhurst’s critically acclaimed musical works including Platform (2015) and PROTO (2019), released through 4AD, have toured major venues like Barbican, London and Volkbühne, Berlin. Their image making practice including NFT series Infinite Images (2021/22) and Classified (2021) were among the earliest experiments with embeddings in foundational image models. Herndon and Dryhust most recently exhibited at the 2024 Whitney Biennial, presenting xHairyMutantx (2024), an interactive text-to-image model.

Since 2021, Herndon and Dryhurst have hosted the Interdependence podcast where they share their ongoing conversations with a network of artists and technologists working with music, AI and crypto. In 2022, the duo co-founded Spawning, an organisation building a consent layer for AI, including tools for artists such as haveibeentrained.com, Kudurru and Source.Plus. This year Herndon and Dryhust were named ‘100 most influential voices in AI’ by TIME Magazine and received the first-ever Digital Human Rights Award from the Austrian Foreign Minister for their work on data empowerment. They have been included in ArtReview’s Power 100 list since 2021. 

Holly Herndon is a fellow at Berlin Artistic Research Programme 2024/25.

Images: © Leon Chew, The Call, Holly Herndon and Mat Dryhurst with sub, Serpentine, 2024