Holly Herndon, Mat Dryhurst, AI Art, Artificial Intelligence, Serpentine Gallery, The Call, London, Exhibition, Interview

Art & Design

Holly Herndon and Mat Dryhurst on Creative Collaboration in the AI Era

The Berlin-based artists are presenting their first solo exhibition, “The Call,” at Serpentine Gallery through February 2.

Holly Herndon and Mat Dryhurst on Creative Collaboration in the AI Era

The Berlin-based artists are presenting their first solo exhibition, “The Call,” at Serpentine Gallery through February 2.

London-based Serpentine Gallery recently opened its doors to Holly Herndon and Mat Dryhurst to present their first solo exhibition dubbed “The Call.” Recognized for their pioneering work between artificial intelligence, art and music, the Berlin-based creative duo have been integral to the formation of machine creativity long before the arrival of “AI” in mainstream lexicon. Together, they’ve produced NFT series, text-to-image models and an open source clone of Herndon’s voice called “Holly+” which acts as a “counter narrative to AI extractivism.” In 2022, the artists launched Spawning; a platform which delivers a consent layer allowing creators to better equip themselves against big tech training structures and data scraping. The crux of their practice centers the technical process of collaborating with artificial intelligence as an artwork in itself. While it’s impossible to be wholly confident about the future use of generative technologies, their optimistic vision for artmaking in the AI era unites us towards a future that is both autonomous and artistic in unison.

Herndon and Dryhurst view AI as a “coordination technology,” akin to ancient practices like group singing and call-and-response, which have long facilitated information sharing and community building. Through this lens, “The Call” highlights the artists’ AI models trained on the collective voices of 15 participating choirs throughout the UK – underscoring how AI can be a tool for collective creativity.

The exhibition will be open until February 2 at Serpentine North.

Continue reading below for the artists’ take on the future of algorithmic artmaking and the journey that led them to “The Call.”

Talk to us about the inspiration behind “The Call.” Do you remember the moment in which the initial idea was sparked?

In a way, we’ve been repeating ourselves for over a decade on very particular points. There’s echoes of previous things we’ve done like group singing performances and data infrastructure which appear in the show. The new part is the exhibition format and the fabrication of objects to make all of these ideas less fleeting. It’s a great opportunity to take these things that we’ve been thinking about for a long time and place them in an environment that people can visit and be present in.

How did you come into partnership with the 15 participating choirs and what was the most surprising part about the collaborations?

We weren’t surprised that people would sign up to do it, because, in our prior experience, as long as you lead with transparency, people tend to be really curious about the process.The aspect that isn’t covered in the data is that choirs really serve as a gathering place to catch up with people. Most people have really busy lives, and they might read an article every now and then, but they’re not going to spend a bunch of time talking about the topic [of AI]. We’re weirdos that spend a lot of time thinking about this stuff and it turns out that most people are relatively sensical about it and have quite a lot of interesting things to say.

Can you tell us about this project from a systems perspective? How do you enable call and response between human and machine at a technical level?

We produced three models for the show. The first is the “Hearth,” which represents this long standing tradition of passing down intergenerational knowledge. The “Hearth” is an instrument that performs songs that were created by a new symbolic AI model, which creates new scores that feed the songbook. When you go into another room, we have an object called the “Wheel,” which is a hanging, chandelier-like object. The “Wheel” is particularly important because it establishes the training protocol for the choirs where the object tells the choirs how to contribute to the training data. Next, we have the “Oratory,” which is a private room where you’re able to interact with another new model that we worked on with the Air Canada Research Institute of Paris. It allows you to navigate the latent space of a model trained on the choirs with your own voice.

We’re encouraging people to contribute their voices to something greater than themselves – an artistic output where you hear new songs that couldn’t have existed without the contributions of the choirs or [your contributions.] The outputs are quite clearly greater than their parts.

What would you say to someone who might claim that the process of working with AI can’t be creative or consensual?

There is the whole bureaucratic, legal conversation to be had about this stuff, which is super important in its own way, but it’s parallel to a cultural, artistic conversation about how these tools request a different way of thinking about making art. The enforced collectivity of datasets is a really interesting opportunity to rethink how we structure IP and how we think about the creative act itself. We’re all building on each other’s works.

Part of the beauty of the show, beyond this spirit of public AI, is contributing to something greater than yourself – seeing this as a cultural evolution, rather than the cyberpunk kitsch stuff that most people associate with AI. There’s also something so beautiful about producing new child songs or new child artworks that couldn’t have happened without all of us, but also don’t belong to any one of us.

Individual rights, which are a great idea, are consensual illusions that we created. Culture and art are much more complicated than that. There’s plenty of reasons to be concerned about protecting people’s interests in a human economy, but ultimately, we [as humans] invented “the individual.”

What scares you the most about the future intersection of human and machine creativity?

The thing that scares me is less to do with the tech and more to do with how it’s wielded. I’m old enough to remember when social media wasn’t really a thing, and then it became the only thing. There’s a troubling dynamic within the platform economy, where those who ultimately have the most resources or the largest audiences tend to dominate quite well. You have to go through them in order to reach people. This is the algorithm where we live.

Now, one of the dangers with these tools that are really good at producing media is that there’s really nothing to impede Jake Paul from releasing the most popular indie rock record next year. If the overheads to produce pretty good media are basically obliterated, people can basically take on 20 different careers. If you already have that network and dominance, you might as well. Super influencers are already like, “I have a makeup line, I sell streetwear, I consult for Louis Vuitton, I release records. I’m a movie star!,” and I don’t know if that’s good for culture. None of this is a problem with AI, this is more a problem with how we coordinate ourselves and what we choose to value.

What excites you the most about the future intersection of human and machine creativity?

We have a tendency to conflate media for art and the accelerational properties of this AI will hopefully bring us to have some conversations that we needed to have in the social media era. Media is usually the way you transfer art from an interesting person to other interesting people, and there’s a lot of people catching up with the true, logical next capabilities of these things.

The idea of art or culture is not in any way under threat. At least by our definition, an artist is someone who distinguishes themselves in the time at which they live. So, nothing can happen that will stop people from making art. [In] a sea of meaningless media, people will look for different kinds of signals and there’s going to be entirely new ways of making art – and that prospect is incredibly exciting.

It’s going to be turbulent, it’s going to be strange and things are going to change. People will still listen to guitar music and they’ll still read books and all of that wonderful stuff. But, we need to understand that those things are going to exist in a media landscape that involves anyone being able to make cool things really quickly. So, don’t kid yourself, it’s happening, but the only way is through, you know?

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