Holly Herndon and Mathew Dryhurst

The artist.

Holly Herndon & Mathew Dryhurst are artists renowned for their pioneering work in machine learning, music and web3. 

They develop their own technology, and protocols for living with the technology of others, often with a focus on the ownership and augmentation of personal identity and voice. These technical systems not only facilitate expansive artworks across media, but are proposed as artworks unto themselves.

They were awarded the 2022 Ars Electronica STARTS prize for digital art for their Holly+ project, proposing a future in which artists permissively share AI models of themselves, and collaboratively co-sell works made in their likeness using a novel DAO governance mechanic. They have been voted on ArtReview’s Power 100 list since 2021.

Their influential contributions to the field of music have seen them headline major international festivals, be awarded Pitchfork’s “Best New Music” for their album work, and hold residency at IRCAM Paris. 

Holly holds a Ph.D in Computer Music from Stanford CCRMA, Mathew is largely self taught. They have held faculty positions at NYU, the European Graduate School, Strelka Institute and the Antikythera Program at the Berggruen Institute. 

They publish their studio research openly through the Interdependence podcast, and recently co-founded Spawning, an organization building identity management tools for the AI era. Their first Spawning project, haveibeentrained.com, delivers artist opt-out requests to AI organizations daily and is widely cited as setting precedent for a future of consenting AI training.

"CLASSIFIED is a self-portraiture collection of 80 artworks exploring the classification “Holly Herndon” embedded in OpenAI’s CLIP model. CLIP knows who I am, so I trained a custom neural network to visualize what CLIP believes me to be. As generator models improve, I release new pieces asking CLIP to produce a portrait of “Holly Herndon”."

MATT DRYHURST and HOLLY HERNDON