Holly Herndon & Mat Dryhurst: The Call
A review of Holly Herndon & Mat Dryhurst's debut solo exhibition at Serpentine North in London, curated by Eva Jaeger.
Enthusiasm for AI in art has reached hysteric heights since OpenAI released ChatGPT in late 2022; the behemoth blue-chip Serpentine Galleries in London is well-positioned to make the most of the fervour in light of their Arts Technologies programme (facilitating artists using advanced technologies), and their record of exhibiting AI art since at least 2014 when Cecile B. Evans’s chatbot AGNES was hosted on their website. The gallery concluded their “year of AI” (per Serpentine’s Art Director, Hans Ulrich Obrist) in 2024 with Holly Herndon and Mat Dryhurst’s solo exhibition, The Call, at Serpentine North.
The Call is made up of four installations (all dated 2024): The Hearth, an altar-like grid of GPU fans tuned to emit said aural “call”; The Wheel, a halo-like structure from which stiff metal songbooks display some of the AI-generated hymns used in the recording sessions; The Oratory, where visitors are prompted to speak or, ideally, sing, one at a time into a standing microphone, triggering a harmonizing, polyphonic response from the choral diffusion model; and Linked Diffusion, a series of uncanny, celestial polyphonies (analogous to the visuals produced by text-to-image LLMs) heard round the perimeter of the gallery, complimenting and mixing with the aural components of each installation.
The intimate scale of Serpentine North’s 19th century brick building provides a chapel-like context for the heavy, metal structures installed behind taupe curtains that bring to mind a YEEZY showroom. The latter phenomenon is the result of Herndon and Dryhurst’s collaboration with the Berlin-based architectural studio, SUB, who worked with Kanye West on his 2022 Donda 2 “listening party” in Miami, and the now defunct Donda Academy, a Christian private school in California’s Simi Valley.
The explicit and implicit invocation of Christianity was, according to Herndon when I spoke to her1, not an exploitation of the aesthetics of trending faith, but a creative decision made on the basis of a number of clever metaphors: a choir is the platonic ideal of the transcendent potential of the individual-cum-collective, and the specific history of the (fundamentally Christian) Sacred Harp tradition is one of mutation and evolution as the practice made its way from 18th c. England to New England and the American South. There was also a practical element to the extent that the circular arrangement of Sacred Harp choralists is ideal for collecting training data (images of which are emblazoned like Stations of the Cross in 3D-printed relief on The Wheel) as the recording technology captures a non-hierarchical impression of each voice simultaneously.
Serpentine Arts Technologies curator Eva Jaeger’s intention that The Call help subdue AI-hysteria through demystification seems a mandate more fitting to a World’s Fair or Science Centre than an art gallery, but is consistent with Herndon and Dryhurst’s preoccupation with transparency of process; their acclaimed ventures in data activism include Spawning, the public domain dataset (offering an alternative to corporatized AI), and Have I been trained?, the accessible data IP consent tool for artists. Accordingly, The Call features a “data trust” piece by which the participating choralists collectively retain GDPR and IP rights over their data.
Still, Herndon and Dryhurst (who have been collaborating for 16+ years) consider themselves artists, first and foremost, operating within a domain they call “Protocol Art”—a Fluxus-adjunct that sounds like a kind of cyborgian Relational Aesthetics, wherein the interactions between the human and machine (the tech stack, platforms), constitute the artwork.
But to approach The Call on its own (fairly heroic) terms as a site for beauty and communion is to confront the impossibility of imagining its aural works inspiring, say, the frenzied paranoia about music that possesses Pozdnyshev in Tolstoy’s Kreutzer Sonata.2 Failing to transcend the administrative quality concomitant to interactions with technology more generally, the coldly stylish sounds of the machine-choir elicit an apathy typically reserved for muzak. Herndon’s characterization of choral singing as a precursor to machine learning technology, or AI as “human intelligence in aggregate,” may then alienate the viewer for whom receiving an AI-generated response to their human voice is an experience disconcertingly less (astonishing, beautiful, etc.) than any one of the sung hymns that make up its parts.
“All media is training data” declares the title of the monograph accompanying the exhibition; the polemic refers to the fact that while not every piece of media has been used to train a model, every piece now has the potential to be, including 18th c. Christian Appalachian mourning hymns. An AI model may be indifferent to the provenance of the data on which it is trained, but the use of religious themes and symbols in The Call seems an attempt to imbue the work with metaphysical weight, if only via a series of metaphors as compelling but incomplete as that between AI and the human brain—conflating infinity with eternity, and the dynamism of the LLM for a form of life itself. This approach is self-defeating insofar as religion and choral music have independent aesthetic value that the AI aspects of the exhibition do not, leaving one longing not for disclosure of the latter’s processes, but for the emergent potential of the chthonic black box.
The artists’ efforts to situate the work in an English context through the use of musical tradition are eclipsed by the distinctly Californian (or the technological determinism of the “California Ideology”) sentiment of their ambitions for AI in art—their techno-optimism; perhaps it is in this ambition that a passion rivalling Pozdnyshev’s could be found. The Call may have benefited from Herndon and Dryhurst embracing an alternative temper to the pragmatism with which they approach their ethical data activism, by simply declaring impassioned fealty to AI.
The Call closed 2 February 2025.
I had the opportunity to interview Herndon for a feature in a publication that has since been cut (!)
An excerpt from The Kreutzer Sonata: “Indeed it is a terrible power to place in anyone’s hands. For example, how could anyone play the Kreutzer Sonata, the first Presto, in a drawing room before ladies dressed in low-cut gowns? To play that Presto, then to applaud it, and then to eat ones and talk over the last bit of scandal? These things should be played only under certain grave, significant conditions, and only then when certain deeds corresponding to such music are to be accomplished: first play the music and perform that which the music was composed for. But to call forth an energy which is not consonant with the place or the time, and an impulse which does not manifest itself in anything, cannot fail to have a harmful effect. On me, at least, it had a horrible impact. It seemed to me that entirely new impulses, new possibilities, were revealed to me in myself, such as I had never dreamed of before.”