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Holly Herndon and Mat Dryhurst: A Singing Machine Heads to MoMA

After a year of teaching an AI choir to sing with the public in Berlin and Düsseldorf, Holly Herndon and Mat Dryhurst bring a new commission to MoMA in 2027.

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For the past year, Holly Herndon and Mat Dryhurst have been teaching a machine to sing by asking people to sing to it. Starmirror, which closed at K21 in Düsseldorf on October 11 after a first chapter at KW Institute for Contemporary Art in Berlin, turned the museum into a recording studio and listening room, designed with the architecture studio sub. On several Sundays, visitors joined local choirs and a vocal ensemble in call and response singing from a songbook the artists built on Ordo virtutum, the 12th century morality play by Hildegard von Bingen. Recordings from the Berlin sessions went into the training data, and the AI choir they produced was heard for the first time in Düsseldorf.

The same rooms held their other experiments. Arboretum (2025) draws on Public Diffusion, an image model trained entirely on public domain data, and The Hearth is an organ that plays melodies on GPU fans, the kind that cool the processors AI runs on. The thinking reaches back to Holly+, the model of Herndon's voice launched in 2021 and stewarded by a DAO, which minted approved works made with the voice as 1/1 NFTs through Zora.

Next comes New York. MoMA has announced a new commission from the duo, their first solo presentation in the city, in its Kravis Studio from March 27 to June 13, 2027 and on the Hyundai Card Digital Wall until September 6. The artists will use the sound of musician led choral performances, open to the audience, to train AI models, and the audiovisual work in progress that results will play on the wall at the same time. It is the first time MoMA has shown an exhibition across both spaces at once. Dryhurst says the show will be called Candlelight.

The new idea in the work is what AI researchers call open endedness, which values exploration over fixed goals. The artists describe it as feeling their way "down dark corridors" by candlelight. Before New York, there is still Venice: Strange Rules, the exhibition on what they call Protocol Art that they curated with Hans Ulrich Obrist and Adriana Rispoli at Palazzo Diedo, stays open until November 22.

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