IN CONVERSATION WITH is a series from Archetype where we interview artists in/at the edges of crypto across music, visual art, design, curation, and more.Mat Dryhurst is a British artist, musician, and technological researcher based in Berlin, Germany. Dryhurst often works on interdisciplinary audiovisual projects in collaboration with his partner Holly Herndon. The pair is known for their pioneering work in music, machine learning, and protocol art and development. Dryhurst and Herndon also founded Spawning, a company building open tools for public AI.Dryhurst’s and Herndon’s critically acclaimed works include Platform (2015), PROTO (2019), Infinite Images (2021-2022), Classified (2021), xHairyMutantx (2024), and The Call (2024). In 2023, Herndon and Dryhurst were named in the “100 most influential voices in AI” by TIME.Dryhurst has also previously taught at NYU’s Clive Davis Institute of Recorded Music, Strelka Institute, and European Graduate School. He also previously served as Director of Programming at Gray Area in San Francisco.The following interview has been edited and condensed for length and clarity.Katie Chiou: For those who may not be familiar with your work, can you share more about your background/journey as an artist? Mat Dryhurst: The short version is that I’ve been making work for a very long time, often with my partner, Holly Herndon. In our art practice, we develop our own instruments, our own tools, and our own software. We get interested in a topic or a technique, try to learn as much about it as possible, and then often make artworks in various different media, exploring those ideas. The convenient alibi for all of this is that we consider the production of software, tools, protocols and different ways of thinking as artworks in and of themselves. KC: You and Holly had a project called Platform in 2015 and then another project called Proto in 2019. Together, they sort of demonstrate a narrative arc of how you think about the evolution of the i