Holly Herndon and Mat Dryhurst
Serpentine North, London Closes 2 February 2025
Step into London’s Serpentine North gallery and the first thing you see is an . But it is far from a conventional instrument with gleaming flues and reeds. This organ is made up of fans used to cool graphics processing units. Each fan whirs at a pitch that depends on its oscillation, and the sounds combine in an otherworldly hymn generated by artificial intelligence.
This communion of AI and the divine drives The Call, the first solo exhibition in the UK by Berlin-based artist duo Holly Herndon and Mat Dryhurst. They worked with 15 choirs across the UK to create a vocal dataset, which they used to train AI to produce choral music. Their work is guided by the mantra that all media is training data, but, as Dryhurst asks, “why not make that performative and deliberate?”
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The GPU-fan organ is called The Hearth by the artists, to signal a place that brings people together. After spending time there, you move on to the South Powder Room. Here, you listen to field recordings of choirs singing exercises from a songbook devised by Herndon and Dryhurst to contain all the distinct units of sound, or phonemes, in the English language.
Inspired by the Sacred Harp tradition, where musicians sing towards each other without an audience, the choirs were arranged in two concentric circles and their music was recorded in 360-degree audio. In the South Powder Room, a evokes the intricate rig of microphones used to capture the audio, and is inscribed with a frieze of cameos depicting recording sessions.
These strict data collection protocols are about more than simple logistics: for the artists, they are rituals designed to reveal AI’s potential as a “coordination technology” allowing individuals to make art and culture collectively, just as singing did in early human societies. “We’re trying to create a historical through-line to make the technology feel less alien, feel more like it came from us,” says Herndon.
At the fringes of the gallery, visitors can hear the results as they listen to compositions by Herndon and Dryhurst, made using models trained on the choral dataset. The pieces are tranquil and strange, gliding over the ear. Left hanging, however, is the question of authorship and remuneration. Who owns this music: Herndon and Dryhurst, the choirs, the gallery?
The voice is a great way to explore how humans make something bigger than themselves
This sticky aspect of The Call is a natural evolution of the issues raised by the artists’ previous work. Take , an AI clone of Herndon’s voice the artists released in 2021. It can be licensed by anyone to make art, after approval by a decentralised organisation of custodians who protect its value.
But it is one thing to fashion a digital likeness of your voice and release it into the world for all to use, and quite another to steward the data of a community and decide how that ought to be used.
The voice is a great way to probe how humans collaborate to make something bigger than themselves, says Herndon: “You have an individual voice that you perform with agency, but you learned that voice through mimicking your parents and learning the language around you.” That push-pull, she adds, is an apt analogy for AI.
Engaging with AI means moving past views of unalloyed good or mindless tech killing the planet. There is a popular misconception of two opposing sides: the AI companies and the artists who hate them, says Dryhurst. “Nobody’s telling that story in a way that’s sympathetic to the complexities.”
The small AI models behind The Call aren’t the energy-guzzling behemoths of major AI firms, and the future of the dataset after the exhibition rests with the choristers, who are in negotiations with Herndon and Dryhurst and the Serpentine Galleries. The aim is to create a data trust that offers control and compensation to the artists whose work is used to train AI.
If I had one criticism of The Call, it would be that this legal and ethical aspect deserves a larger part of the exhibition. But it is hard to keep that in mind as you enter , the final chamber of the exhibition. Here, each visitor is invited to sing into a microphone and hear a polyphonic AI harmonise in real time. I found it a transcendent experience, where AI’s limitations and imperfections are present without intruding.
There are plenty of unknowns about governance, ethics and ownership to fathom. But if you question whether AI can stir the soul, then a moment spent singing through The Call’s celestial voice should put scepticism to bed.
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