Holly Herndon & Mat Dryhurst – Starmirror

In the organizer's words:

KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin and the Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Düsseldorf are pleased to jointly realize an extensive exhibition and live program with the artists and technologists Holly Herndon and Mat Dryhurst.
The exhibition is one of eleven selected projects that the German Federal Cultural Foundation is supporting with its new program "Art & AI - Fund for New Artistic Perspectives on AI and Society".

We not only want to present a new kind of exhibition, but also 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 known for their work at the intersection of art, music, machine learning and experimental forms of organization. In their wide-ranging practice, they address 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 test 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 are creating an immersive sound installation that simultaneously serves 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.

For the duration of the exhibition, visitors are invited to participate in weekly public vocal recordings with local choirs and under the direction of a vocal ensemble. The singers sing in an interplay of call and response from a songbook developed by the artists especially for the project, thus providing data for a public choral model. The songbook is based on the 12th century Benedictine abbess and polymath Hildegard von Bingen's morality play Ordo Virtutum. In it, a soul must choose between the forces of good and evil. With their work, Herndon and Dryhurst invite the audience into a live process of AI training. The vocal recordings at KW will form a data set that will enable the artists to develop a Berlin AI choir with their AI model, which will then be premiered as a work in the exhibition at K21 Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen. The presentation there will include further performances and recordings that will 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 data set and earlier recordings. These intermediate acts offer an insight into the training process and allow the exhibition to unfold over time. They help to contextualize the processes and technical systems underlying the artists' creative production.

The project is accompanied by other works, including Public Diffusion, a base image model trained entirely with public domain data, and Starmirror, a context demon that prompts people to provide missing information. While Hildegard of Bingen was concerned with the hierarchy of angels, Herndon and Dryhurst are concerned with 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. Here, the complexity of AI becomes a collective, embodied process.

The exhibition design is conceived by the architecture firm sub. The exhibition is a cooperation between KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin and KunstsammlungNordrhein-Westfalen, Düsseldorf.

Berlin-based artists Holly Herndon (* 1980, USA) and Mat Dryhurst (* 1984, UK) are known for their pioneering work in the fields of music, machine learning and "protocol development". Their wide-ranging practice has led to groundbreaking projects in which the technical systems underpinning creative production are themselves works of art. For Holly+ (2021), they trained an AI clone of Herndon's voice, freely usable by all and with a mechanism for sharing the profits from the commercial use of her identity. Herndon and Dryhurst's critically acclaimed musical works, including Platform (2015) and PROTO (2019), released via the 4AD label, have been performed at major venues such as the Barbican in London and the Volksbühne in Berlin. Her visual practice primarily documents her novel interventions in software.

Crossing the Interface (2021) was the world's first text-to-video animation and Classified (2021) offered a novel way of producing portraits of embeddings in image models. Herndon and Dryhurst last exhibited at the 2024 Whitney Biennial, presenting xhairymutantx (2024), an interactive text-to-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 fellow of the Berlin Artistic Research Program 2024/25. Since 2021, Herndon and Dryhurst have been running the podcast Interdependence, where they have ongoing conversations with a network of artists and technologists working in music, AI and crypto.

sub is a Berlin-based architecture firm dedicated to designing spaces of optimal relevance and creating environments where culture can flourish. Their work is based on a deep exploration of socio-cultural dynamics, semantics and technology and encompasses a wide range of spatial and temporal scales.

Funded by the Art & AI program of the German Federal Cultural Foundation. The Federal Cultural Foundation is funded by the Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media.

In cooperation with the Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Düsseldorf

With thanks to d&b audiotechnik with Soundscape

Media partners: York Cinema Group, Rausgegangen

Price information:

Tickets can only be purchased on site and by card payment. The following cards are accepted: Girocard, Mastercard, VISA, Maestro, VISA Electron and ApplePay. Regular 10 € / Reduced 6 €. Berlin Welcome Card holders €6 / reduced €4.50. Reduction applies to pupils, students, federal volunteers, BBK members, ALG 1 recipients, trainees, holders of the volunteer card and severely disabled persons (at least 50 % MdE) on presentation of proof. Free admission: up to and including the age of 18, for Friends of KW and Berlin Biennale and KW Lover*, holders of proof of eligibility (formerly berlinpass), recipients of ALG II, enrolled students of Weißensee Kunsthochschule Berlin and Berlin University of the Arts, ICOM members, Museumsbund members. Assistance animals are permitted in the exhibition rooms. Please identify yourself accordingly at the cash desk. Other animals are not permitted.