Holly Herndon & Mat Dryhurst
"AI is just us, in aggregate—it is beautiful and requires rethinking how we arrange life."
Our interview with Holly Herndon & Mat Dryhurst about The Call, their show at the Serpentine Gallery (ends this Sunday 2nd February).
Interview by Richard Starbuck.
Could you tell us a bit about yourselves and your background? How did you two meet?
We have been married for nearly 20 years and initially met when Holly wrote an email to the label Mat was working for in London, asking why their podcast was so late. We have been living together since the second time we met!
In The Call at the Serpentine Gallery, you present AI as an extension of choral traditions rather than a replacement for human voices. The installation includes detailed relief sculptures, suspended structures, and immersive spatial audio, creating a sense of ritual and collective experience. How do you see this approach contributing to the wider conversation about AI’s role in creativity and social connection?
We are trying to position AI as a monumental collective accomplishment and coordination technology, part of a lineage that goes back to group singing rituals that predate language, and religious protocols that emphasize participation in something greater than the sum of its parts. We feel this is a more interesting framework for approaching the subject and can also be instructive for policy moving forward. AI is just us, in aggregate—it is beautiful and requires rethinking how we arrange life.
AI is becoming more present in artistic practices, sparking discussions about whether it expands creative possibilities or diminishes human authorship. In your work, do you see AI as more of a tool, a collaborator, or something else?
It is both. We intervene in every step of the AI model creation process, from deliberately producing training data, to captioning, and setting the protocol for how to interact with them. As such we see a lot of potential for models, and protocols, to be considered their own medium. The authorship question is complicated, every new technology faces accusations of dehumanization. Many physical artworks in major exhibitions could be understood as detailed prompts sent to fabricators, and most people don’t really know about the 16 writers behind their favourite songs. Our position is to try and be as open and celebratory of the complexities of what it takes to make ambitious art happen, and AI tools offer new capacity to achieve remarkable things. We view things as positive sum.
© Leon Chew, The Call, Holly Herndon and Mat Dryhurst with sub, Serpentine, 2024
© Leon Chew, The Call, Holly Herndon and Mat Dryhurst with sub, Serpentine, 2024
© Leon Chew, The Call, Holly Herndon and Mat Dryhurst with sub, Serpentine, 2024
© Leon Chew, The Call, Holly Herndon and Mat Dryhurst with sub, Serpentine, 2024
© Leon Chew, The Call, Holly Herndon and Mat Dryhurst with sub, Serpentine, 2024
© Leon Chew, The Call, Holly Herndon and Mat Dryhurst with sub, Serpentine, 2024
Holly Herndon and Mat Dryhurst conducting a recording session with London Contemporary Voices in London, 2024. Courtesy: Foreign Body Productions.
Holly Herndon and Mat Dryhurst conducting a recording session with London Contemporary Voices in London, 2024. Courtesy: Foreign Body Productions.
Sound has always played an important role in rituals, gatherings, and cultural traditions. How do you think about the connection between sound and space in your work, and how does that influence the way people experience it?
We are particularly interested in how religious architecture was often designed to create a sense of contributing to something greater than oneself. Church architects were the original Phil Spector. It has been a great pleasure to work with the architecture studio sub on this show, thinking about how physical space might encourage a spirit of contemplative contribution to the human archive.
Tell us a bit about how you spend your day/studio routine. What is your studio like?
We always have at least five projects going at once, and between art, our tech work, and parenting, we basically share a brain at this point. The week is a blur, yet somehow things still happen. We couldn’t accomplish all that we do without close relationships with brilliant collaborators. Our studio is essentially countless communication channels.
What artwork have you seen recently that has resonated with you?
We recently revisited Mitchell Chan’s The Boys of Summer, which is a beautiful and complex example of communicating a perspective subtly through a video game.
Is there anything new and exciting in the pipeline you would like to tell us about?
With our collaborators at Spawning, we are currently in the process of training Public Diffusion, a foundational text-to-image model trained only on data that nobody owns.
All images courtesy of the artists and Serpentine Gallery
Interview publish date: 27/01/2025
