Ethereum

Embedding Study #3

Collection

xhairymutantx by Holly Herndon and Mat Dryhurst

Creator

Holly Herndon and Mat Dryhurst

Description

"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." Commissioned for the 2024 Whitney Biennial, artists Holly Herndon and Mat Dryhurst’s xhairymutantx exists both within the Museum’s sixth floor gallery as well as here on artport. This project focuses on training 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 side bangs, and bright blue eyes. Herndon has become well known in the music and digital art worlds, 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 prompts generate an image with some of the characteristics of Holly Herndon, the character. Here on artport, the artists have trained a text-to-image AI model on images of Holly that have been altered through costuming that distorts the artist’s body, and exaggerates her most noted feature, her hair, 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. 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. Whitney Museum of American Art

Traits