Serpentine, London

Holly Herndon and Mat Dryhurst

The Call

Oct 4, 2024 - Feb 4, 2025

Featured Exhibition Image

Overview

If all media is training data, including art, let’s turn the production of training data into art instead.

- Holly Herndon & Mat Dryhurst

The Call is an innovative exploration of AI’s potential as a collective, communicative, and creative technology. Conceived in collaboration with Serpentine Arts Technologies, the exhibition reimagines artificial intelligence not merely as a technological tool, but as a contemporary extension of ancient traditions of choral singing - rituals that have historically united individual voices into collective expression. Central to the exhibition is the creation of new, collectively sourced vocal datasets, innovative polyphonic AI models, and forward-thinking governance structures. To generate these datasets, the artists composed a dedicated songbook comprising original hymns, singing exercises, and structured recording protocols. Herndon and Dryhurst travelled across the UK to record professional and community choirs, capturing diverse human voices. The choristers became part of a Data Trust experiment, examining new ways of distributing agency and power between those who contribute data and those who utilise the resulting AI models.
At the exhibition’s core, visitors encounter three interconnected installations: The Hearth, The Wheel, and The Oratory. In the first, The Hearth, an intricate sculptural installation resembling neural network architecture powered by GPU fans stores the choral AI model on magnetic tape,symbolically preserving the collective human voice. In The Wheel, spatialised field recordings from the choir tour envelop visitors, channelled through an installation inspired by a circular microphone rig, featuring gilded panels evoking choral formations. The surrounding multi-channel compositions, created from trained AI models, invite exploration into the harmonious blend of human and synthetic voices. Finally, visitors engage directly with The Oratory, an interactive AI-driven installation activated by the human voice. Here, individuals harmonise in real-time with an AI model, reinforcing the symbiotic relationship between human creativity and technological augmentation.
Through The Call, Herndon and Dryhurst present a new artistic ritual for the AI era, transforming individual voices into a powerful collective expression and offering profound insights into the possibilities of ethically developed AI as a tool for communal creation.
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