xhairymutant Embedding Study 1 (Photos By Gail)

These works by artists Holly Herndon and Mat Dryhurst are 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 bangs, and bright blue eyes. Herndon has become well-known in the music and digital art world, 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 prompt generates an image with some of the characteristics of Holly Herndon, the character.

xhairymutant Embedding Study 1

The images on the walls of the Whitney Museum are 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 Herndon, 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 Herndon. 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 Whitney.org 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.

Photographed at The Whitney Museum in NYC as Part of the 2024 Biennial