30
January
–
30
January
19:00
19:00
‘The Call’ Finissage
‘The Call’ Finissage
A choral recording session to close Holly Herndon and Mat Dryhurst’s Serpentine Exhibition. Presented in collaboration with Serpentine.
Join artists Holly Herndon, Mat Dryhurst and Serpentine’s Arts Technologies team for a final choral recording celebrating the closing days of their exhibition, The Call. In developing The Call, the team toured the UK, working with 15 different choirs to record a training data set for a suite of choral AI models. The choirs sang from a songbook specifically composed for AI training.
During this informal recording session, London Contemporary Voices and audience members are invited to sing from Herndon and Dryhust’s songbook and record a final session that will be added to the choral dataset. The event includes songs and exercises performed from the songbook, insights into the songbook's AI design, and stories from the recording tour.
The recording session will last approximately 90 minutes. Audience members who would like to sing will join the choir —no music reading or prior experience is required (you will be prompted in situ). People who do not wish to participate can watch from the gallery.
BSL interpretation is available on request. Please get in touch at info@serpentinegalleries.org.
Artist bios:
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.
Presented in collaboration with Serpentine.
Image credit: Holly Herndon and Mat Dryhurst conducting a recording session with London Contemporary Voices in London, 2024. Courtesy: Foreign Body Productions.
Join artists Holly Herndon, Mat Dryhurst and Serpentine’s Arts Technologies team for a final choral recording celebrating the closing days of their exhibition, The Call. In developing The Call, the team toured the UK, working with 15 different choirs to record a training data set for a suite of choral AI models. The choirs sang from a songbook specifically composed for AI training.
During this informal recording session, London Contemporary Voices and audience members are invited to sing from Herndon and Dryhust’s songbook and record a final session that will be added to the choral dataset. The event includes songs and exercises performed from the songbook, insights into the songbook's AI design, and stories from the recording tour.
The recording session will last approximately 90 minutes. Audience members who would like to sing will join the choir —no music reading or prior experience is required (you will be prompted in situ). People who do not wish to participate can watch from the gallery.
BSL interpretation is available on request. Please get in touch at info@serpentinegalleries.org.
Artist bios:
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.
Presented in collaboration with Serpentine.
Image credit: Holly Herndon and Mat Dryhurst conducting a recording session with London Contemporary Voices in London, 2024. Courtesy: Foreign Body Productions.
