Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Düsseldorf and the KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin partner to realize a major exhibition with artists and technologists Holly Herndon (b. 1980 in Johnson City) and Mat Dryhurst (b. 1984 in Birmingham). The duo is internationally recognized for their work at the intersection of art, music, machine learning, and experimental organization.

With Starmirror, Herndon and Dryhurst transform the exhibition spaces of both institutions into a training ground for collaborative art and music production between humans and AI. Working with the architectural office sub, they create an immersive sound installation that functions simultaneously as a recording and listening environment. Throughout the exhibition, visitors are invited to participate in public vocal recording sessions, alongside local community choirs and under the guidance of a vocal ensemble. The recordings will form a dataset that enables the artists to form an AI choir. A songbook specifically developed for the project 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 exhibition presents AI as a tangible, collective process and sheds light on hierarchies of technical protocols and their invisible role in shaping the world around us.

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”.