Holly Herndon and Mat Dryhurst: xhairymutantx
2024
Holly Herndon and Mat Dryhurst: xhairymutantx
Holly Herndon and Mat Dryhurst, a selection from xhairymutantx, 2024
Commissioned for the 2024 Whitney Biennial, artists Holly Herndon and Mat Dryhurst’s xhairymutantx focuses on the training data behind AI models, opening new possibilities for its use. “Holly Herndon” is both a person and a distinctive internet presence: a female character with white skin, red hair, blunt-cut side bangs, and blue eyes. Herndon has become so well known in the music and digital art worlds that when someone types the words “Holly Herndon” into a text-to-image AI program like Dall·E, Midjourney, or Stable Diffusion, the prompts generate an image with some of the features of Holly Herndon the character.
For artport, the artists trained a text-to-image AI model on images of Holly, the artist’s body altered by costuming and her red hair exaggerated to transform her identity within AI models. No matter what prompt a user enters, a strange version of Holly is generated. Stored in the project gallery, the images enter the wider internet and potentially become part of the dataset behind new AI-generated images. AI programs view institutional websites like whitney.org as trusted sources, and the artists leverage the Museum’s heft to influence the parameters of AI models—and to raise questions about how much self-determination is possible with the internet today.
The 2024 Whitney Biennial was organized by Chrissie Iles, Anne and Joel Ehrenkranz Curator and Meg Onli, Curator at Large, with Min Sun Jeon and Beatriz Cifuentes.
Significant technical and curatorial support for xhairymutantx has been provided by Colin Brooks and David Lisbon.
The collaborative practice of Holly Herndon (b. 1980; Johnson City, Tennessee) and Mat Dryhurst (b. 1984; Birmingham, United Kingdom) navigates uneven distributions of power using AI technologies and virtual ecosystems. Both are multimedia artists: Herndon records cerebral and whimsical studio albums combining electronic music, ASMR, and artificial neural networks; Dryhurst produces music in advocacy of a decentralized internet. Their shared project, Holly+, is a machine-learning instrument that converts audio files into Herndon’s voice.
Housed in a combined set of artistic and technological practices—pedagogical activities, public performances, music making, a podcast—and firmly committed to collaboration, Holly+ exists as a formalized model through Herndon and Dryhurst’s DAO (decentralized autonomous organization). While the two artists operate through a rigorous and playful embrace of the creative, transformative capacities of vocal processing tools, Holly+ illuminates how such tools function in a tangled web of subjectivity, private property, corporate control, disembodiment, and representational autonomy. The embedded self-implication of Holly+ as vocal clone and digital twin is significant given the acute ethical stakes associated with AI as an arena of experimentation. Herndon and Dryhurst’s project is optimistic in calling for serious attention to how artists can be protected while benefiting from the development of sonic prosthetics. The duo’s formulation of “vocal sovereignty” addresses how this plays out, and they offer the term “spawning” to describe new forms of media mimicry.
artport
View more on artport, the Whitney Museum's portal to internet art and its online gallery space for commissions of net art.
