Holly Herndon & Mat Dryhurst – Starmirror

The exhibition is one of eleven selected projects supported by the German Federal Cultural Foundation's new program "Art & AI - Fund for New Artistic Perspectives on AI and Society."

• Curators: Emma Enderby, Liberty Adrien
  
• Assistant Curator: Linda Franken
  

They aim not only to present a new kind of exhibition, but also to provide an infrastructure—an open protocol—that others can use in the future.

Holly Herndon and Mat Dryhurst

Holly Herndon (* 1980, US) and Mat Dryhurst (* 1984, UK) are internationally renowned for their work at the intersection of art, music, machine learning, and experimental organizational forms. Their broad practice explores the unequal distribution of power through the use of AI technologies and virtual ecosystems. They create data protocols as a medium of possibilities and use them to explore new arrangements between humans and artificial intelligence.


With Starmirror, Herndon and Dryhurst transform the exhibition spaces of KW and subsequently the K21 Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen into a training ground for the collaborative production of art and music between humans and artificial intelligence.


In collaboration with the design and architecture studio sub, they create an immersive sound installation that serves simultaneously as a recording studio and listening environment, as well as a living archive. Here, the connections between collective song and the collective nature of AI are made tangible.


During the exhibition, visitors are invited to participate in weekly public vocal recordings with local choirs under the direction of a vocal ensemble. The singers will sing in a call-and-response style from a songbook developed by the artists specifically for the project, thus providing data for a public choir model.


The songbook is based on the morality play Ordo Virtutum by the 12th-century Benedictine abbess and polymath Hildegard of Bingen. In it, a soul must choose between the forces of good and evil. With their work, Herndon and Dryhurst invite the audience to a live AI training process. The vocal recordings at the KW will form a dataset that will enable the artists to develop a Berlin AI choir using their AI model, which will then be premiered as a work in the exhibition at the K21 Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen.


The presentation there will include further performances and recordings that contribute to the ongoing development of the work. Outside of the recording times at KW, Hildegard von Bingen's Morality Play will be experienced in the exhibition, along with streaming compositions generated from the evolving dataset and previous recordings. These interludes offer insight into the training process and allow the exhibition to unfold over time. They help contextualize the processes and technical systems underlying the artists' creative production.


The project will be accompanied by other works, including Public Diffusion, a baseline image model trained entirely on public-domain data, and Starmirror, a contextual daemon that calls on humans to provide missing information. While Hildegard von Bingen explored the hierarchy of angels, Herndon and Dryhurst explore the hierarchies of technical protocols and their invisible role in shaping the world around us.


Together, these elements form a public AI protocol in which human and non-human actors contribute to a shared context. The exhibition addresses a crucial gap in the public perception of artificial intelligence. It offers a direct and participatory experience of the human work and interaction that underpins it. The complexity of AI becomes a collective, embodied process.


The exhibition design is by the architectural firm sub. The exhibition is a collaboration between the KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin, and the Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Düsseldorf.


The Berlin-based artists Holly Herndon (* 1980, USA) and Mat Dryhurst (* 1984, UK) are known for their pioneering work in music, machine learning, and protocol engineering. Their wide-ranging practice has led to groundbreaking projects in which the technical systems underlying creative production are themselves works of art. For Holly+ (2021), they trained an AI clone of Herndon's voice, freely usable by anyone and with a mechanism for sharing profits from the commercial exploitation of her identity.


Herndon and Dryhurst's critically acclaimed musical works, including Platform (2015) and PROTO (2019), released on the 4AD label, have been performed at major venues such as the Barbican in London and the Volksbühne in Berlin. Their visual practice primarily documents their novel interventions in software.


Crossing the Interface (2021) was the world's first text-to-video animation, and Classified (2021) offered a novel way to produce portraits of embeddings in image models. Herndon and Dryhurst most recently exhibited at the 2024 Whitney Biennial, presenting xhairymutantx (2024), an interactive text-image model designed to manipulate Holly's public image. In 2024, they presented the solo exhibition The Call at the Serpentine Gallery in London.


In 2022, the duo co-founded Spawning, an organization building a consent layer for AI, including tools for artists such as haveibeentrained.com, Kudurru, and Source.Plus. They were awarded the Ars Electronica STARTS Prize for Digital Art in 2022, Austria's first Digital Human Rights Award in 2024, and the Kairos Prize in 2025. Holly Herndon holds a PhD in computer music from Stanford University and is a 2024/25 fellow in the Berlin Artistic Research Program.


Since 2021, Herndon and Dryhurst have hosted the podcast Interdependence, featuring ongoing conversations with a network of artists and technologists working in music, AI, and crypto.


sub is a Berlin-based architectural firm dedicated to designing spaces of optimal relevance and creating environments where culture can flourish. Their work is grounded in in-depth research into sociocultural dynamics, semantics, and technology, spanning a broad spectrum of spatial and temporal scales.


Funded by the German Federal Cultural Foundation's Art & AI program. The German Federal Cultural Foundation receives funding from the Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media.


In collaboration with the Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Düsseldorf