November 24, 2025Artist duo Holly Herndon and Mat Dryhurst spoke with Peter Bauman (Monk Antony) about their major new work Starmirror at KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin, on view until January 18, 2026. They discuss the work within the larger context of protocols as worlds, AI’s impact on public space, and the blurring line between artists and scientists.About the AuthorHolly Herndon and Mat Dryhurst, Starmirror (Installation view with Herndon at KW, Berlin), 2025. Courtesy of the artists and Frank Sperling‍Holly Herndon & Mat Dryhurst on Artificial PsychedeliaArtist duo Holly Herndon and Mat Dryhurst spoke with Peter Bauman (Monk Antony) about their major new work Starmirror at KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin, on view until January 18, 2026. They discuss the work within the larger context of protocols as worlds, AI’s impact on public space, and the blurring line between artists and scientists.‍‍Peter Bauman: Let’s begin with your current show. Can you talk about how Starmirror extends your two-decade investigation of voices and machines, including 2024’s The Call?‍‍Holly Herndon: Starmirror is chapter two in the series, the German edition. With the UK edition, The Call, we were looking at the UK choral canon and mixing that with Sacred Harp music for the songbook that we wrote for the choirs to sing.For this edition, we were looking at the German repertoire, but I think we've all celebrated German classical music to death, so we didn't want to dive into that period. We decided to go back even earlier to medieval Germany and found Hildegard von Bingen, who's actually having a bit of an art moment right now, which is really funny. There are all these things that are inspired by her.‍There's this joke that the first Renaissance man was a medieval woman and it was Hildegard von Bingen.She was a wild mystic. These visions would come to her and then she would write them down as poetry, as music, as herbal medicinal recipes. She really was dabbling in