Identity Play and the Artist with Holly Herndon

9 Dec 2024 · 35 min
The Future of You

9 Dec 2024 · 35 min

0:00

In this episode of The Future Review, host Tracey Follows interviews artist‑researcher Holly Herndon about how artificial intelligence reshapes identity, creativity, and artistic agency. Holly explains her background in computer music and AI, the development of her personal voice‑model project Holly+ that lets others perform with her own vocal data, and the ethical rationale for using her own IP. She contrasts the current "platform era"—dominated by services like Spotify and Instagram—with a emerging "protocol era" where artists control the underlying rules and distribution of their work. Holly discusses her forthcoming book All Media Is Training Data, arguing that any captured media becomes machine‑readable training data, raising surveillance and privacy concerns. The conversation delves into her Serpentine Gallery exhibition, which treats the entire model‑building pipeline—from data collection with UK choirs to a GPU‑fan organ and interactive, screen‑free vocal performance—as an artwork. Holly describes the evolution of the term "spawn" into the organization Spawning, which develops tools for opt‑out of training datasets and promotes public‑domain models for artist ownership. Legal gray areas around voice‑model IP, royalties, and personality rights are examined. She also shares the "x‑Hairy Mutant x" Whitney Biennial project that manipulates her digital persona to reclaim agency. Finally, Holly speculates on the future of identity as a networked, pluralistic self and the role of art in helping people navigate the alienation of a technologically mediated world.

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