Holly Herndon & Mat Dryhurst on Artificial Psychedelia

Holly Herndon and Mat Dryhurst discuss their installation Starmirror at KW Institute for Contemporary Art in Berlin, on view until January 18, 2026, as an attempt to build an AI public space that persists, unlike most AI models that produce ephemera. Starmirror is the German chapter of their series after The Call, the UK edition, and draws on medieval composer Hildegard von Bingen, with a songbook that hosts call-and-response choir singing in the exhibition space. Herndon and Dryhurst also argue that culture is an ongoing act of reinterpretation rather than a fixed file, and that AI models work in a similarly recombinative way.