​Listen to this episode on:
Spotify | Apple Podcasts | Amazon

Holly Herndon and Mat Dryhurst's collaborative practice navigates uneven distributions of power using AI technologies and virtual ecosystems. Both are multimedia artists: Herndon records cerebral and whimsical studio albums combining electronic music, ASMR, and artificial neural networks; Dryhurst produces music in advocacy of a decentralized internet. Their shared project, Holly+ is a machine-learning instrument that converts audio files into Herndon’s voice.Housed in a combined set of artistic and technological practices—pedagogical activities, public performances, music making, a podcast—and firmly committed to collaboration, Holly+ exists as a formalized model through Herndon and Dryhurst’s DAO (decentralized autonomous organization). While the two artists operate through a rigorous and playful embrace of the creative, transformative capacities of vocal processing tools, Holly+ illuminates how such tools function in a tangled web of subjectivity, private property, corporate control, disembodiment, and representational autonomy. The embedded self-implication of Holly+ as vocal clone and digital twin is significant given the acute ethical stakes associated with AI as an arena of experimentation. Herndon and Dryhurst’s project is optimistic in calling for serious attention on how artists can be protected while benefiting from the development of sonic prosthetics. The duo’s formulation of “vocal sovereignty” addresses how this plays out; and they offer the term “spawning” to describe new forms of media mimicry.

This episode is supported by Digital Original.

About Digital Original