Image: San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
Holly Herndon, Mat Dryhurst and Hans Ulrich Obrist will discuss art, technology, protocol art, AI, artistic control and the future of culture on November 15, 2026. The program is co-presented with Villa Albertine and will take place at 4 p.m. in the Phyllis Wattis Theater. The three longtime colleagues, collaborators and friends will continue an ongoing conversation.
Earlier this year, Herndon, Dryhurst and Obrist co-curated ‘Strange Rules’ at Palazzo Diedo in Venice. The exhibition explored protocol art: art that uses technological systems shaping how culture is made and seen as its artistic material, including AI, algorithms and apps. In protocol art, the artwork is presented as a living process built on instructions and open to collaboration with viewers and machines.
Herndon and Dryhurst are Berlin-based artists known for work in music, machine learning and protocol development. At the 2024 Whitney Biennial, they presented ‘xhairymutantx’ (2024), an interactive text-to-image model designed to poison Herndon’s public image. The duo co-founded Spawning in 2022, an organization building a consent layer for AI that includes tools for artists. Their musical works include ‘Platform’ (2015) and ‘PROTO’ (2019), released through 4AD.
Obrist is artistic director of Serpentine in London, advisor to California Academy of Studio Arts and senior advisor at LUMA Arles; since his first exhibition, ‘World Soup (The Kitchen Show)’, in 1991, he has curated more than 350 shows.
