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THE MUSEUM OF MODERN ART TO PRESENT MAJOR NEW COMMISSION
BY HOLLY HERNDON AND MAT DRYHURST
NEW YORK, October 9, 2026 — @MuseumModernArt will present a newly commissioned audio, visual, and performance-based work by renowned artists and musicians @hollyherndon and @matdryhurst, a newly commissioned audio, visual, and performance-based work by renowned artists and musicians Holly Herndon and Mat Dryhurst, marking the duo’s first solo presentation in New York. The commission will be staged jointly in the Museum’s Marie-Josée and Henry Kravis Studio (March 27–June 13, 2027) and on the Hyundai Card Digital Wall (March 27–September 6, 2027), marking the first time MoMA has presented an exhibition across both spaces simultaneously. In the Kravis Studio, Herndon and Dryhurst will create an immersive audio environment for musician-led live choral performances, which will be open to audience participation. The artists will use the collective sound from these events to train AI models and, in turn, generate a new audiovisual work-in-process that will be displayed concurrently on the Hyundai Card Digital Wall. Holly Herndon and Mat Dryhurst is organized by Michelle Kuo, Chief Curator at Large and Publisher, with Helena Klevorn, Curatorial Assistant, Department of the Chief Curator at Large, and Ho Won Kim, Hyundai Card Exchange Visitor.
Together, the two installations will turn the Museum into a laboratory for exploring the future of performance, technology, and human experience and the ways music, art, and machines can inspire collective emotion. Presenting new models for machine learning and human feeling, the exhibition will suggest how we might find ways to live with AI.
Herndon and Dryhurst train their AI models in public: Their spaces record the people who perform inside them and hold a memory of everything that happens there. New to this work is a focus on open-endedness, a branch of AI research built on the idea that the most important discoveries cannot be planned in advance and that rewards exploration over fixed goals.
Through participatory singing, the artists draw parallels between older musical forms and the call-and-response training of AI models and AI agents. They have also incorporated their own subjective associations, the sounds, images, and feelings to which they are drawn, to better understand their own minds and network them with others. In open-ended experiments with AI models, they investigate how human knowledge and AI might grow together, each pushing the other into new territory. The artists ask: Do machines not only learn, but feel? How has AI begun to shape not just our thoughts, but our deepest and most personal emotions and memories? How might humans shape this new world, in turn?
BY HOLLY HERNDON AND MAT DRYHURST
NEW YORK, October 9, 2026 — @MuseumModernArt will present a newly commissioned audio, visual, and performance-based work by renowned artists and musicians @hollyherndon and @matdryhurst, a newly commissioned audio, visual, and performance-based work by renowned artists and musicians Holly Herndon and Mat Dryhurst, marking the duo’s first solo presentation in New York. The commission will be staged jointly in the Museum’s Marie-Josée and Henry Kravis Studio (March 27–June 13, 2027) and on the Hyundai Card Digital Wall (March 27–September 6, 2027), marking the first time MoMA has presented an exhibition across both spaces simultaneously. In the Kravis Studio, Herndon and Dryhurst will create an immersive audio environment for musician-led live choral performances, which will be open to audience participation. The artists will use the collective sound from these events to train AI models and, in turn, generate a new audiovisual work-in-process that will be displayed concurrently on the Hyundai Card Digital Wall. Holly Herndon and Mat Dryhurst is organized by Michelle Kuo, Chief Curator at Large and Publisher, with Helena Klevorn, Curatorial Assistant, Department of the Chief Curator at Large, and Ho Won Kim, Hyundai Card Exchange Visitor.
Together, the two installations will turn the Museum into a laboratory for exploring the future of performance, technology, and human experience and the ways music, art, and machines can inspire collective emotion. Presenting new models for machine learning and human feeling, the exhibition will suggest how we might find ways to live with AI.
Herndon and Dryhurst train their AI models in public: Their spaces record the people who perform inside them and hold a memory of everything that happens there. New to this work is a focus on open-endedness, a branch of AI research built on the idea that the most important discoveries cannot be planned in advance and that rewards exploration over fixed goals.
Through participatory singing, the artists draw parallels between older musical forms and the call-and-response training of AI models and AI agents. They have also incorporated their own subjective associations, the sounds, images, and feelings to which they are drawn, to better understand their own minds and network them with others. In open-ended experiments with AI models, they investigate how human knowledge and AI might grow together, each pushing the other into new territory. The artists ask: Do machines not only learn, but feel? How has AI begun to shape not just our thoughts, but our deepest and most personal emotions and memories? How might humans shape this new world, in turn?
