From the 4th October to the 2nd February 2025, Serpentine Galleries hosts Holly Hernden and Mat Dryhurst’s The Call: New Rituals for Collaboration with AI. This pioneering artwork is a striking audiovisual experience which concerns itself with some of the central ethical questions of generative AI today: who owns us and what we create? And how do we navigate the new world of AI in all its versatility? Georgia Smith MBCS reports.
Collaborative AI exhibition from Berlin based artists Holly Herndon and Mat Dryhurst. The audience is drawn through two chambers, one where a set of hymns composed specially for the exhibition rings through a circle of speakers, and one where the audience themselves have the opportunity to sing into a microphone and hear the specially developed AI sing back, collaborating with their voice.
An ancient call, a modern response
For millennia, collective singing, including techniques like call and response, has been a way for humans to share information and experiences, forming and cementing cultural and community bonds. Holly and Mat wanted to bring AI, a human creation, into that tradition, making it a part of the creative process and something that is able to collaborate and coordinate with us. The Call really asks: humans make everything into art — what we’re doing right now is collecting data and training AIs with it. Why not make that process into art?
The central aspect of The Call is its choral AI models, trained in collaboration with choirs throughout the UK. To train the AI, Holly and Mat composed a set of hymns and singing exercises and recorded them being sung by 15 choirs. The Call also approaches a question plaguing many in the creative sector at the moment by implementing an experimental ‘Data Trust’ which aims to ensure an ethical distribution of decision making power over what happens to the recorded vocals; the idea behind the trust is that the choristers, or creators, have as much say in the usage of their ‘data’ as those who want to train a AI models with it.
Ritualising robots
Looking around the exhibition, it’s impossible to ignore the highly intentional religious composition of the piece. Not only is the setting of Serpentine North chapel-like with its high ceilings and echoing floors, but the central ‘chandelier’ from which the speakers playing the choral recordings hang is covered with scenes from the recording sessions, reminiscent of images of miracles or saints that could be found in a church — and additionally, there is nowhere in the exhibition one can travel that escapes the haunting hymns, filling the space as transcendentally as any Roman Catholic choir. The lyrics of the specially composed hymns also reflect this intention, often focusing on the idea of submission to a higher power.
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This presentation is thought provoking; does it mean we should be mindful of treating AI and related new technologies with reverence as the powerful, transformative tools that they are rather than playthings? Or is it about the beauty of collaborating with technology and submitting to the possibilities it presents rather than fighting against it? Curious, I asked Mat what message he hoped the audience would take away. ‘It’s important to lean into ambiguity a little’, he explains. ‘We situate AI as along a lineage of coordination technologies, from language, to group singing, instruments and holy architectures. When you are thinking about coordination, or submission to something more, you cannot escape the realm of religion, and a lot of beauty has been created in those traditions. Our feeling is that training AI is just what we do now, and so it makes sense to memorialise and protocolise this new thing we all do.’
A new era of intellectual property
Central to the project is the idea that people, and artists, should retain ownership and governance over what they create — the experimental ‘Data Trust’ is based on the idea of sharing decision making power equally between creators and consumers of data. Speaking on this concept and where it might lead, Mat explains, ‘We are still determining if a trust is indeed the optimal framework for it, but we do think there is a lot to explore in terms of common ownership of data and models. Datasets and models are necessarily collective, and so it makes sense to see them as something we all own together.
‘We have been doing policy work around AI for years now, and there need to be many more experiments as to how to navigate this new era of intellectual property. The team behind Holly+ [an AI deepfake vocal ‘twin’ created by co-artist Holly Herndon] put forward a strong proposal that has since been adopted by others, and we imagine this experiment could also be instructive. One of the benefits of doing this work in the arts is that the risks associated with failure are lower than if we were playing with health data, which leaves a lot more room to experiment in good faith.’
Combining legality and culture
Following on from that idea of ownership within The Call, as I explored the exhibition it was hard not to notice how many people were photographing and filming — myself included — and could, in theory, do as they pleased with that data. I asked Mat if he thinks will ever really be truly possible to regulate data usage and ownership. ‘Great point’, he responds. ‘It’s important to not let perfect be the enemy of good when it comes to this issue. The amount of data needed to train highly performant AI models is significant, and of course there is a difference between companies commercialising data and models and the average person playing with their own models at home. In fact in the EU, so long as you are not commercialising a model anything is legal.’
But as he continues, he comments on another, less often examined aspect of the future of ethical AI — how important it is to make AI and data training a part of culture rather than adjacent to it or hidden from view. ‘…It is important to establish norms, manners, protocols around these things — as ultimately no technical fix will cover everything, or even should.’ Social norms and expectations have power, and only by accepting AI as a collaborative new part of human life can we hope to develop those, and build a grassroots ethics around acceptable data collection and usage to complement legal regulation.
As well as being a haunting and artistically mesmerising exhibition, Holly and Mat’s The Call both raises important questions and suggests innovative approaches to the ethical issues surrounding AI and data collection today, forcing us to confront and submit to the possibilities of its inexorable advance into human culture.
The exhibition runs until February 2nd 2025. Tickets are available on the Serpentine Galleries website.
