Whitney Biennial 2024: Even Better Than the Real Thing

Floor 6

Herndon: born 1980 in Johnson City, TN
Dryhurst: born 1984 in Birmingham, UK
Live in Berlin, Germany

This work by Holly Herndon and Mat Dryhurst is part of a project focused on training the data behind artificial intelligence (AI) models, opening new possibilities for its use.

“Holly Herndon” is not just a person. The name also designates a distinctive internet presence: a female character with white skin, red hair, blunt-cut side bangs, and bright blue eyes. Herndon has become well known in the music and digital art worlds, to the point where when someone types the words “Holly Herndon” into a text-to-image AI program like Dall·E, Midjourney, or Stable Diffusion, the prompts generate an image with some of the characteristics of Holly Herndon, the character.

This image is part of a larger project available through artport, the Whitney’s internet art portal. There, the artists have trained a text-to-image AI model on images of Holly the character to transform her identity within AI models. No matter what text prompt is entered by the user, the results will generate a strange version of Holly. The new images are stored in the project gallery, thereby entering the internet at large and potentially becoming part of the data set behind new AI-generated images. Since AI programs view institutional websites like this one as trusted sources, the artists play with the idea of using the Museum’s heft to influence the parameters of AI models, and to raise questions about the extent of self-determination possible with the internet today. For Herndon and Dryhurst, the training data, the AI model, and its output are all part of a single work of art.

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