The Call

A collaboration between artists Holly Herndon and Mat Dryhurst, and Serpentine Arts Technologies, The Call proposes new cultural, legal, and technical rituals for art in the age of AI. “If all media is training data, including art, let’s turn the production of training data into art instead.” —Holly Herndon & Mat Dryhurst Berlin-based artists Holly Herndon and Mat Dryhurst approach AI as a coordination and communication technology, much like singing has been for millennia. Historically, singing techniques like call and response have been rituals for communication, leading us to build spaces and structures for gathering, processing, transmitting information, and creating meaning in social and civic life. Like a choir, where many individual voices become a collective, the artists propose that AI can further augment the transformation from the individual to the collective. The Call centres on developing new protocols and materials for the creation of choral AI models. To train the AI, Herndon and Dryhurst have composed a songbook of hymnals, singing exercises and a recording protocol, travelling with the Serpentine Arts Technologies team to record fifteen community choirs across the UK. The choristers are now part of a Data Trust experiment that allows for the distribution of power between the contributors to the training data and those who use the models. The immersive and interactive spatial audio installation uses the created models to activate the chapel-like setting of Serpentine North. A year’s worth of new protocols and collectively created materials for training AI are presented as new artefacts for gathering and ritual, co-designed by architecture studio, sub. The work offers us renewed insight into the networked and collective nature of human creation in the 21st century. 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

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