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KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin, and the Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Düsseldorf partner to realize a major exhibition and live program with artists and technologists Holly Herndon and Mat Dryhurst.The exhibition is one out of eleven selected projects, that the German Federal Cultural Foundation (Kulturstiftung des Bundes) supports through its new program ‘Art & AI – Fonds for Artistic Projects on AI and society’.
We’re looking not only to present a new kind of exhibition but also provide infrastructure – an open protocol – for others to use going forward. – Holly Herndon and Mat Dryhurst
Holly Herndon (b. 1980, US) and Mat Dryhurst (b. 1984, UK) are internationally recognized for their work at the intersection of art, music, machine learning, and experimental organization. Their wide-ranging practice engages with the unequal distribution of power through the use of AI technologies and virtual ecosystems. They create protocols as a medium of possibility, using them to rehearse new arrangements between humans and Artificial Intelligence (AI).
With Starmirror, Herndon and Dryhurst transform the exhibition spaces of KW and subsequently K21 Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen into a training ground for collaborative art and music production between humans and AI. In collaboration with the design and architecture studio sub, they create an immersive sound installation that functions simultaneously as a recording and listening environment, as well as a living archive where the connections between collective singing and the collective nature of AI are made tangible.
Throughout the exhibition, visitors are invited to participate in regular public vocal recording sessions, alongside local community choirs and under the guidance of a vocal ensemble. The singers will perform with call-and-response from a songbook specifically developed by the artists for the project, submitting data for a public choral model. The songbook is based on Ordo Virtutum, a 12th-century medieval morality play by Hildegard von Bingen–the Benedictine abbess and polymath–in which a soul must choose between the forces of good and evil. The work invites the public into a live process of AI training. The vocal recordings at KW will form a dataset that enables the artists to work with their AI model to form an AI Berlin choir, which will debut as a work at K21 Kunst-sammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen within a new iteration of the exhibition. This presentation will feature further performances and recordings, contributing to the ongoing development of the piece. Outside of recording times at KW, the experience of Hildegard von Bingen’s morality play will be presented within the exhibition, alongside streaming compositions generated from the evolving dataset and previous recordings. These interludes offer insight into the training process, allow the exhibition to unfold over time, and help contextualize the processes and technical systems underpinning the artists’ creative production.
The project is accompanied by additional works, including Public Diffusion, a foundation image model trained entirely on public domain data, and Starmirror, a context daemon that prompts humans to supply missing information. If Hildegard von Bingen were concerned with the hierarchy of angels, Herndon and Dryhurst are concerned with the hierarchies of technical protocols and their invisible role in shaping the world around us. Together, these elements form a public AI protocol where human and nonhuman agents contribute to a shared context. The exhibition addresses a critical gap in the public perception of artificial intelligence, offering a direct and participatory experience of the human labor and interaction at its core. Here, the complexity of AI becomes a collective, embodied process.
The exhibition design is conceived by the architectural office sub. The exhibition is a collaboration between KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin and the Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Düsseldorf, where the second part of the exhibition project will be shown 27 June – 11 October 2026.
Curator: Emma Enderby, Liberty Adrien
Assistant Curator: Linda Franken
Photo: Holly Herndon & Mat Dryhurst, Starmirror, 2025. Public Diffusion Image with Starmirror-Design by Patricia Klein. Courtesy KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin and Kunstsammlung Nordhein-Westfalen, Düsseldorf © Holly Herndon & Mat Dryhurst.
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