Tentacular Festival. Holly Herndon, Mat Dryhurst & Evgeny Morozov

Proto, by Holly Herndon, is one of the most intriguing music albums published so far in the XXI Century. This singular composer and singer has explored more in depth than anybody else in her music the emotional landscapes of the Internet. For her 2019 album Herndon created along with her collaborators Mat Dryhurst and Jules la Place a new kind of vocalist; an Artificial Intelligence entity called “Spawn” that would listen to her vocals and reply back, offering new melodies and creative possibilities. In Proto, human and machine voices are melted together in a choir that shows how the future of creativity in this planet will include other forms of intelligence, not only ours. But who will get to control and own the tools of Artistic Artificial Intelligence, artists or the megaconglomerates that own all means of digital production?

In this very special occasion, Holly Herndon and Mat Dryhurst will walk us through the creation of Spawn and meet with one of the most influential public intellectuals in the world writing about the politics of the technology sector today: the always mordacious Evgeny Morozov. Together, they will discuss how to imagine a future for AI that doesn’t rest in the hands of the global corporations that already own almost every bit of our digital lives.

Holly Herndon is an American composer, musician, and sound artist based in Berlin. After studying composition at Stanford University and completing her Ph.D. at Stanford University’s Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics. Her records “Movement” and “Platform”, sonic explorations of post Internet aesthetics, made her one of the most groundbreaking and innovative names in the global electronic music scene. In 2019 she played her most recent album Proto in festivals and concert halls all over the world.

Mat Dryhurst is a “medium-agnostic” artist and thinker whose work intersects with the worlds of music, tech, art, philosophy, and activism. He built a self-hosting publishing framework called Saga, and sits on the board of the streaming collective Resonate. His interests condense around questions of the possible forms of human community under the conditions of informatic capitalism, the limits and powers of machine learning, and the significance of blockchain technologies.

Evgeny Morozov is a writer and researcher who studies the political and social implications of technology. Politico named him one of the 28 most influential Europeans in 2018. He is the author of “The Net Delusion” (2011), a book that sparked a global debate about the democratizing capabilities of the Internet, and “To Save Everything, Click Here: The Folly of Technological Solutionism” (2014). His writing has appeared in The New York Times, El Pais, The Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, The Economist, The Guardian or The New Yorker. He is the founder of the website https://the-syllabus.com