Holly Herndon (b. 1980) and Mat Dryhurst (b. 1984) are multimedia artists and musicians whose collaborative practice navigates uneven distributions of power through AI technologies and virtual ecosystems. Herndon records studio albums that combine electronic music, ASMR, and artificial neural networks, while Dryhurst produces music and advocates for a decentralized internet.
Dryhurst has been Herndon's collaborator on her recorded albums since 2013.Her second album, Platform, released through RVNG Intl and 4AD, addressed surveillance and systemic inequality through contributions from other artists across disciplines, part of what Herndon has described as a transparent alternative to music's “lone genius” myth.The album Proto (2019) grew out of a machine-learning neural network the two trained on Herndon's own voice and compositions.
Herndon and Dryhurst have made machine-learning models together since 2017, contributing to the development of the AI image generator DALL-E.In 2021 OpenAI invited them to work with its DALL-E 1 research model, and the resulting series Infinite Images extended single generations outward through outpainting into large, composite images built like an exquisite corpse. In their own words, these were “the only artworks produced with the original DALL-E model”.They also launched Holly+ (2021),a machine-learning instrument, governed through a DAO, that converts any uploaded audio into Herndon's singing voice.CLASSIFIED (2021) was later shown in HEK Basel's 2023 exhibition “Collective Worldbuilding — Art in the Metaverse”.
For the 2024 Whitney Biennial they were commissioned to make xhairymutantx, an online project, open to public prompts, that trains a text-to-image model on manipulated images of Herndon to reshape how AI systems represent her likeness.,Later that year their solo exhibition “The Call” opened at the Serpentine in London, built from choral recordings gathered from fifteen community choirs across the United Kingdom and used to train a vocal model. It included The Wheel (2024), a sculpture holding the choirs' songbooks, and The Oratory (2024), curtained rooms where visitors could sing with the resulting model. Dryhurst has described the AI systems built for these works as “us in aggregate” rather than an alien intelligence.In 2025 they opened “Starmirror” at KW Institute for Contemporary Art in Berlin, a German edition of “The Call” built around a songbook adapted from the medieval composer Hildegard von Bingen.In 2026 they co-curated “Strange Rules” at Palazzo Diedo in Venice with Hans Ulrich Obrist and Adriana Rispoli, and contributed a new ground-floor installation made in partnership with the architecture studio SUB.,
