Artist Talk
Holly Herndon, Mat Dryhurst and sub

Moderated by Emma Enderby

This conversation brings together artists Holly Herndon and Mat Dryhurst with Ilaria Peloso and Christopher Blohm from the architecture studio sub, and explores their approach to collaborative work. Developed over several projects, from Starmirror, currently on view at KW, to the artists’ exhibition The Call at the Serpentine Gallery in London in 2024/25, the collaboration between Herndon & Dryhurst and sub has generated spaces where artistic, architectural, and technological languages meet and reshape one another. Considering the frameworks of their practice, the discussion pays particular attention to how protocols and machine learning systems can inhabit space, perception, and collective experience, and the ways in which sound, space, and technology can be choreographed into new modes of encounter.

sub is a Berlin-based architecture office committed to designing spaces of optimal relevance and to creating environments for culture to unfold. Their work is rooted in deep research into sociocultural dynamics, semantics, and technology, and it spans a wide range of spatial and temporal scales.

Holly Herndon and Mat Dryhurst are Berlin-based artists known for their groundbreaking work in music, machine learning, and protocol development, creating projects in which technical systems function as artworks. They recently exhibited at the Whitney Biennial and the Serpentine Gallery in London, both in 2024, and have received recognitions including the Kairos Prize in 2025, Austria’s Digital Human Rights Award in 2024, and the Ars Electronica STARTS Prize in 2022. Their projects range from Holly+ (2021), an AI clone of Herndon’s voice available for public use, to the acclaimed albums Platform (2015) and PROTO (2019). They also developed Crossing the Interface (2021), the first text-to-video animations, and Classified (2021), a method for generating portraits from model embeddings. In 2022, they co-founded Spawning, an organisation building a consent layer for AI with tools such as haveibeentrained.com, Kudurru, and Source.Plus. Herndon holds a doctorate in Computer Music from Stanford University and is a fellow at the Berlin Artistic Research Programme 2024/25.