A collaboration between artists Holly Herndon and Mat Dryhurst, and Serpentine Arts Technologies, The Call proposes new cultural, legal, and technical rituals for art in the age of AI.

“If all media is training data, including art, let’s turn the production of training data into art instead.”

– Holly Herndon & Mat Dryhurst

Berlin-based artists Holly Herndon and Mat Dryhurst approach AI as a coordination and communication technology, much like singing has been for millennia. Historically, singing techniques like call and response have been rituals for communication, leading us to build spaces and structures for gathering, processing, transmitting information, and creating meaning in social and civic life. Like a choir, where many individual voices become a collective, the artists propose that AI can further augment the transformation from the individual to the collective.

The Call centres on developing new protocols and materials for the creation of choral AI models. To train the AI, Herndon and Dryhurst have composed a songbook of hymnals, singing exercises and a recording protocol, travelling with the Serpentine Arts Technologies team to record fifteen community choirs across the UK. The choristers are now part of a Data Trust experiment that allows for the distribution of power between the contributors to the training data and those who use the models.

The immersive and interactive spatial audio installation uses the created models to activate the chapel-like setting of Serpentine North. A year’s worth of new protocols and collectively created materials for training AI are presented as new artefacts for gathering and ritual, co-designed by architecture studio, sub. The work offers us renewed insight into the networked and collective nature of human creation in the 21st century.