Holly Herndon and Mat Dryhurst
I’M HERE 17.12.2022 5:44
In an early and defining use of AI image generators, Holly Herndon and Mat Dryhurst employ the dreamlike qualities of these technologies to visualize a coma-induced reverie, full of maternal emotion and dire personal circumstances. Following giving birth to their child Link, Herndon fell into a week-long coma in hospital. Part-capturing-evidence and part-coping-strategy, Dryhurst video recorded the experience, including an audio account of Herndon’s memory of the coma that serves as narration for the short video I’M HERE 17.12.2022 5:44. The painterly blur, morphological instability, and organic slippage between self and other in the video are all features of prompt-driven AI image generators that synthesize new images based on training models. Generic datasets form the basis for these models and are used by the general public, but sophisticated operators like Herndon and Dryhurst have local copies of these tools (running on a supercomputer in their Berlin studio) that are highly customized and trained in multiple ways. For this work dozens of images of Herndon were used to train the resulting depictions of her face, as well as images of their son, and shots from their travels and past projects. All scenes are trained on specific images by the duo, processed through custom guidance models and depth maps, and then rendered by the AI. The artists employ audio AI in the soundtrack for the work as well, for example the chorus sung in the beginning. In this work the artist duo explores how such tools can serve as masking filters, making it possible to visualize deeply personal events, offering a public version of a private story. Memory itself is slippery and subject to reinterpretation, and so is the variable output of these tools, which can produce limitless permutations of the same event.