Starmirror Training Performance

Starmirror ensemble: Sara Gouzy, Marina Kerdraon-Dammekens, Andria Prokopa

On several Sundays throughout the exhibition Starmirror by Holly Herndon & Mat Dryhurst, participants are invited into a live process of AI training, as the hall of KW transforms into a recording studio where local choirs, an ensembles, and visitors contribute their voices in call-and-response sessions.

During these sessions, participants are asked to sing hymns from Herndon’s and Dryhurst’s newly created songbook, generated by a model trained on Ordo Virtutum (1151)—a morality play by Hildegard von Bingen (1098–1179), the German Benedictine abbess and polymath, in which a soul must choose between good and evil. The artists took inspiration from Hildegard von Bingen, seeing analogies between her visions of a celestial order between humans and the cosmos, and the protocols shaping today’s cultural and technological infrastructures.

Each Sunday, a Berlin-based choir joins the ensemble for the call-and-response sessions, singing alongside visitors. To join the sessions, no prior knowledge or preparation are required, just openness and enthusiasm for collective singing. They are training performances, offering a direct, participatory experience with the human contributions that define AI.

The recordings of the sessions form the basis of a public choral dataset, which will train an AI “Berlin choir” to debut at Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen (K21) in Düsseldorf.

The vocal ensemble Byrdland is an eight-member solo-voice ensemble from Berlin. The group combines the joy of exploring new horizons and emotions together with a lively dialogue with the audience. A special focus lies on the connection between Renaissance and contemporary vocal music, creating soundscapes that surprise and move – from Palestrina to pop, from Byrd to Birdland.