Berlin’s KW Institute for Contemporary Art is currently presenting Starmirror, an immersive exhibition by Holly Herndon and Mat Dryhurst, on view until January 18th, 2026. The exhibition transforms the space into a participatory human-AI laboratory, where visitors contribute to the creation of an AI choir. It explores the intersection of sound, music, and machine learning art, offering a hands-on experience of collective intelligence.
Machine learning art and human collaboration
Starmirror reimagines artificial intelligence as a coordination technology, enabling humans to collaborate for shared creative outcomes. Visitors join weekly sessions, singing alongside choirs and ensembles in call-and-response exercises based on a songbook derived from Hildegard von Bingen’s 12th-century morality play Ordo Virtutum. These recordings feed a public AI choral dataset, which will train a Berlin AI choir debuting at the Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen in Düsseldorf later this year.
Holly Herndon and Mat Dryhurst’s immersive installations
At the entrance, Arboretum showcases Public Diffusion, an image model trained entirely on public domain data, alongside the Ur-Hildegard Training Corpus, a songbook reimagined through machine learning. The hall features an immersive sound and light installation, created with architectural studio sub, blending references to religious imagery, computational models, and neural networks. It also includes The Hearth, an acoustic organ powered by GPU fans, connecting machine processes to live sound.
Building on Herndon and Dryhurst’s ongoing work in machine learning art, including Herndon’s AI-driven album PROTO (2019), the exhibition positions AI as an active collaborator rather than a passive tool. Starmirror transforms human-AI interaction into a shared creative process, offering visitors a direct encounter with emergent intelligence.
Exploring human-AI collaboration and protocols
Through these layered installations, the exhibition addresses the invisible hierarchies of technical protocols, illustrating how human labor and AI interaction shape cultural production. Beyond recording sessions, visitors experience AI-generated outputs, live sound compositions, and visualizations that make computational processes tangible. Holly Herndon and Mat Dryhurst invite audiences to consider AI as a collaborative agent, capable of expanding artistic possibilities rather than replacing human creativity. Starmirror is a bold exploration of collective creation, ethical AI, and the future of human-AI partnerships.
Join Holly Herndon, Mat Dryhurst, Hans Ulrich Obrist, and Eva Jäger as they discuss the influence of AI on contemporary art. They will reflect on consent and collaboration, and discuss how artists can shape technology in a responsible way.
HOLLY HERNDON & MAT DRYHURST, 2025
Photography by FRANK SPERLING
