Holly Herndon & Mat Dryhurst: Starmirror

“Starmirror” is a new project by the artists and AI pioneers Holly Herndon and Mat Dryhurst. Herndon and Dryhurst are known for their groundbreaking work in the areas of music, machine learning and software development, as well as their artistic research into the history and methods of collective singing. In cooperation with the architectural firm Sub, they are developing an interactive art installation that explores the relationship of music and artificial intelligence. The installation will be presented in two exhibitions in Berlin and Düsseldorf. The artists invite the audience, singers and amateur choirs to participate in weekly vocal recordings. The 12th-century drama “Ordo Virtutum” by Hildegard von Bingen about a soul that must choose between the powers of good and evil serves as the musical starting point of the project. The artist duo will be developing a songbook based on local singing traditions as the basis for training the AI models. 
Visitors of the exhibition will be able to experience how AI is created – through human activity and training processes based on enormous amounts of data. The installation also playfully examines the potential and complex problems posed by audio deepfakes, or voice cloning, which raises questions regarding property rights and the role of machine learning in artistic production processes. As a personal form of expression, the voice, when processed as data material by AI, raises ethical and legal issues which have significant consequences far beyond the art context.

Exhibition: 
KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin: 31 October 2025 – 18 January 2026
K21 of the Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Düsseldorf: 27 June – 11 October 2026