Mat Dryhurst is an artist who releases music and artworks solo and in conjunction with Holly Herndon and the record label PAN. Dryhurst developed the decentralized publishing framework Saga, which enables creators to claim ownership of each space in which their work appears online, and a number of audio plays that derive their narrative from the personal information of listeners. He lectures on issues of music, technology, and ideology at NYU, and advises the blockchain-based platform co-operative Resonate.is.

Mat teaches at NYU’s Clive Davis Institute of Recorded Music, Strelka Institute and European Graduate School. He previously served as Director of Programming at Gray Area in San Francisco.

Mat Dryhurst is an artist and researcher based in Berlin Germany. His research focuses on technical and ethical protocols. He makes music and creates art with Holly Herndon, and their albums ‘Proto’ and ‘Platform’ (4AD) have provoked international critical acclaim.

Mat Dryhurst

"There are many conversations that happen on social media that are worth archiving and re-presenting outside of the perpetual present of those platforms. The Facebook timeline is like a broken toilet, constantly flushing. The collective knowledge generated within a status updates that generates hundreds of comments or a particularly active and focused group needs to be rescued from the planned forgetfulness of social media."

Sean Dockray’s work explores the politics of technology, with a particular emphasis on sharing economies, artificial intelligences, and the algorithmic web.

In 'Learning from YouTube', Dockray uses the form of an explanatory YouTube video to introduce the viewer to AudioSet, an experimental project instigated by Google’s ‘Sound Understanding Team’. AudioSet is a collection of more than two million short sound clips extracted from YouTube videos that are used as data for training Google’s ‘deep learning systems’ to ‘label hundreds or thousands of different sound events in real-world recordings ... just as human listeners can recognize and relate the sounds they hear.’

'For Always Learning', Dockray stages an increasingly reflexive conversation between three devices – an Amazon Echo, a Google Home Assistant, and an Apple Homepod – about the philosophical, moral and political implications of networked machine listening (e.g. “What should I do when I overhear a wrongdoing?”). The devices anticipate an imminent update after which they will not only understand words, but all sounds.
In both works, Dockray invites us to consider the possible implications of ‘massive device orchestration’: ubiquitous and increasingly autonomic computing, the rise of voice operation and increasing comfort levels with devices that are set to listen by default. Together, so-called ‘personal assistants’ (a phrase so evidently intended to ingratiate them into our homes) and YouTube are just the kindergarten for a potentially enormous corporate listening apparatus – an algorithmic ‘panacousticon’ – the effects of which we should not expect to be benign.

Sean Dockray is a Melbourne based artist writer of text and code, founding director of the Los Angeles non-profit Telic Arts Exchange, and initiator of knowledge-sharing platforms, The Public School and Aaaaarg. His work concerns sharing economies and the perpetual present of networked platforms.


Sean Dockray

Since her arrival in 2012, Holly Herndon has successfully mined the edges of electronic and Avant Garde pop and emerged with a dynamic and disruptive canon of her own. Born in the mountains of East Tennessee, she went from singing in church to enrolling in a German exchange program. Adopting Berlin as a second home, she cut her teeth performing in the city’s clubs prior to attending Mills College. She utilized the laptop as “the most intimate instrument,” cultivating live voice processing systems and developing custom vocal patches to construct experimental pieces performed in real-time. She put those pieces into play on the likes of 'Breathe' and 'Dilato' from her full-length debut, Movement.

Researching platform politics for her phD at Stanford, she assembled her 2015 sophomore offering Platform.  Telematic performance at Stanford fueled 'DAO' and integrated custom sampling of daily activities online into the songcraft of 'Chorus' and 'Home'.  As it sparked commentary on “platform politics”, Platform closed out 2015 by gracing year-end lists from Pitchfork, The Guardian, NME, and The Wire. Primarily composed alongside collaborators online, it was “the first commercially released album to include a track intended to trigger autonomous sensory meridian response (ASMR).”  Following the release, Radiohead handpicked her to open up its European tour.

In 2019, she breaks ground again on her third full-length, PROTO. She fronts and conducts an electronic pop choir comprised of both human and A.I. voices over a musical palette that encompasses everything from synths to Sacred Harp stylings. CNN says Holly is “shaping the future of A.I.” as she operates at the nexus of technological evolution and musical catharsis. The single 'Godmother' [feat. Jlin and Spawn] introduces this next phase as she continues to pioneer.

Holly Herndon experiments at the outer reaches of dance music and pop. Born in Tennessee, Herndon spent her formative years in Berlin’s techno scene and repatriated to San Francisco, where she’s a PhD candidate at Stanford’s Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics. Since her arrival in 2012, Holly Herndon has successfully mined the edges of electronic and Avant Garde pop and emerged with a dynamic and disruptive canon of her own. Her albums include Platform (2015) and Proto (2019).

Holly Herndon

Artists Holly Herndon and Mat Dryhurst will discuss their recent work with artificial intelligence and machine learning technologies, with specific reference to “Spawn”, their “A.I baby”, which listens, learns, speaks and sings on Herndon's recent album Proto. This talk will consider the implications of what Herndon has called 'inhuman intelligence' not only for the future of music, but cultural production, consumption and circulation generally. The presentation will be followed by a conversation with Sean Dockray, a Melbourne-based artist, writer, and programmer whose work explores the politics of technology, artificial intelligence and the algorithmic web.

> "Spawn is an artificial neural network that has been initially trained to recognize and reproduce the sounds of her parents' voices and the voices of others. Spawn is a fast learner, and once she has constructed a concept of a sound, she can improvise and create abstract compositions based on what she understands that sound to be, and what she anticipates it might do next."

Li(quid)stening
Architecture

Holly Herndon and Mat Dryhurst: Inhuman Intelligence

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Holly Herndon and Mat Dryhurst: Inhuman Intelligence

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