Artists Holly Herndon And Mat Dryhurst Explore AI Artmaking At Serpentine
A new exhibition at the Serpentine gallery in London delves into the potential of collaborative artmaking in the age of artificial intelligence. This engaging and highly intriguing show invites viewers to reflect on ways in which technology is reshaping the creative process while also addressing pressing societal concerns around AI.
A collaborative project between artists and musicians, two of the most influential artists working in AI, Holly Herndon and Mat Dryhurst, and Serpentine Arts Technologies, "The Call" draws on the age-old practices and rituals of community musical groups, namely choir singers, to explore the possibilities of co-creating with the machine. Simultaneously, the exhibition dabbles with the question of data ownership in the era of AI—investigating how we might build collaborative datasets that are collectively owned and governed. This is about nurturing the mind of AI to be a better machine.
At the heart of the exhibition is the collective creation of new vocal datasets—polyphonic AI models designed to handle and generate multiple distinct elements simultaneously. The result is an immersive experience where human and machine voices intertwine, drawing the audience into the choir—at times making them part of the performance itself.
For Herndon and Dryhurst, AI is a creative instrument. If guided well, then it will perform well. The artists view every process of AI training as part of the art making, so rather than ask if AI will replace the artist, they are saying how can we as artists create art with AI collaboratively to benefit both parties.
This is where community choir groups play a vital role. While they seem far removed from the cold mechanics of AI, Herndon and Dryhurst see the warmth, sense of belonging, and the collective processes—group support, camaraderie, rituals of call-and-response—educating AI to follow a more collaborative path. For millennia such rituals have helped make spaces for gathering and building social and civic meaning, so why not teach and encourage the machine to think similarly.
To train the AI models, Herndon and Dryhurst composed a songbook of hymns and vocal exercises, performed by fifteen ensembles and captured using a multi-channel recording protocol. The choral dataset tour was held in spring 2024 and spanned across the UK to cities from Belfast in Ireland to Leeds and Bristol. In the Serpentine gallery, multi-channel audios let visitors immerse themselves in these performances, experiencing firsthand how community dynamics might inform AI's future.
What's possibly more intriguing is how the artists are seeing this as an opportunity to intervene and explore governance frameworks. Part of the experiment involves recording choral music and incorporating these voices into AI models. But the path also raises deeper questions: How can individuals and groups collectively own their data and control its use—whether to share it freely or charge for it? Central to this vision is the role of a data trustee, ensuring that both individual and collective rights are upheld.
To illustrate how everything functions, the Serpentine gallery has been transformed into a machine, with each zone representing a different aspect of AI learning. The space is both educational and interactive, designed to demystify machine learning by offering visitors hands-on exploration of its processes. It's really about taking the scary edge off AI so we can all take part in it's educational future.
As we plunge ever-deeper into the unknown AI future, understanding how it works and taking ownership of the journey by engaging with the data is critical. This is something Serpentine has been investigating for the past decade with Serpentine Arts Technologies. Likewise, Herndon and Dryhurst see actively and consciously shaping the training data as essential in how we will drive the next generation of AI models.
Herndon says the exhibition has deepened her appreciation for the archive. She highlights how, once something is captured in media—whether as an audio file, video, or photograph—it becomes machine-readable and could potentially be used in a training set. By recognizing the generative potential of each piece of media, the artists are therefore able to handle the dataset with greater care.
"The Call" is no ordinary exhibition. Rather, this is a live research project, a vibrant discussion that uses a seemingly simple concept to help untangle the complexities of a world where humans and AI will be living side-by-side. Essentially, Herdnon and Dryhurst are imagining the art institution as a laboratory for discovering new technologies through an artist-led AI system.
"With 'The Call,' we're offering a beautiful way to make AI. We're thinking of the creation of the data, the training of the model, and its output all as works of art," says Herndon.
In recent years, the Serpentine gallery has presented an array of exhibitions exploring future-facing art. Together, they have been weaving an exciting story around the critical role of the artist and art institution in the age of machine intelligence. As Hans Ulrich Obrist, Serpentine's artistic director, says: artists have the power to make the invisible visible.
Spending time cocooned in the Serpentine North gallery space, exploring my own shaky voice through the AI choral model and experiencing a personal call-and-response with the machine, and then being treated to soul-warming live choral performance by the Hive Choir from Belfast, I'm feeling less anxious about an AI takeover. Herdnon and Dryhurst are questioning and contemplating so many of our concerns with how to be human in the age of the machine—or better what is humanness as we race towards this unknown world. And it is a strangely human show that addresses such a non-human medium, beautifully conceived and packed with wonderful sensory experiences.
Read my interview with Hans Ulrich Obrist , Serpentine's artistic director.
"The Call," Holly Herndon and Mat Dryhurst is at Serpentine North from 4 October 2024 to 2 February 2025)
