Holly Herndon, a composer, artist and musician who has gained considerable recognition beyond the art world, has been working with artist and technology researcher Mathew Dryhurst since 2013. Their joint projects investigate the potential of digital tools to facilitate new forms of collaboration, prompting a reassessment of the role of automated surveillance and artificial intelligence in the most intimate aspects of contemporary life. The defence of a decentralised internet that challenges the limits of copyright and the very idea of artistic property has informed much of their recent work. Holly + (2021), for example, devised a protocol for sharing Herndon’s voice – synthesised in the form of a fully functional deepfake twin – which could then be used by other artists under DAO (Decentralized Autonomous Organization) governance. In 2022, they cofounded Spawning, an online concept and tool allowing any artist to opt-in or opt-out of major AI training datasets.

Herndon and Dryhurst were among the first artists to utilise generative AI tools, particularly text-to-image generators, to conceive visual works. They customized a version of Stable Diffusion using only their own training data. I'm here 17.12.2022 5:44 was composed after a difficult personal ordeal – Herndon’s coma following the birth of their child, Link. The narrative of this intense experience, recorded in the days following her awakening, serves as a voice-over and introduces the prompt-driven generation of a series of images that were later reworked into an animation. Erratic and discontinuous, the visual sequence creates an unexpected, highly contrasting dialogue with Herndon’s emotionally charged narrative, at times anticipating her words and at others bouncing off her voice. The artists also illustrate the many faces of image generation, sometimes blurry, sometimes hyper-realistic, which can produce an infinite number of variations from a single textual source. While AI generators rely on the ever-changing data landscape of the internet, in this work Herndon and Dryhurst use them to develop a complex and deliberately unstable form of writing that reveals the vulnerability of memory, the shifting boundaries of the self and the unsettling visual intensity of artificial creation.

Marcella Lista, 2024