LONDON.- This autumn, Serpentine presents the first UK solo exhibition of LA-based artist Lauren Halsey and features the latest installment in its year of AI with Holly Herndon & Mat Dryhurst.

The live programme, hosted in Minsuk Cho's Serpentine Pavilion titled Archipelagic Void, includes performances that activate the space.

Continuing its commitment to bringing art beyond gallery walls, Serpentine offers large-scale public art in Kensington Gardens. Gerhard Richter's STRIP-TOWER is displayed at Serpentine South, Yayoi Kusama's tallest Pumpkin sculpture is by the Round Pond, and Atta Kwami's final mural remains on view until September.

HOLLY HERNDON & MAT DRYHURST THE CALL

SERPENTINE NORTH
FRIDAY 4 OCTOBER 2024 - SUNDAY 2 FEBRUARY 2025
PRESS VIEW THURSDAY 3 OCTOBER 2024, 9.30AM-12PM

This October, Serpentine will stage The Call, the first solo exhibition of Berlin-based artists and musicians Holly Herndon and Mat Dryhurst. Presented at Serpentine North from 4 October 2024 to 2 February 2025, the exhibition will address current societal concerns with AI, and platform musical ensembles from across the UK in a participatory experience for the public.

Serpentine Arts Technologies’ commitment to understanding the ways in which artists interrogate and experiment with AI systems has been integral since the department's inception in 2014. Major AI projects that have emerged from the programme include Cécile B Evans (2014-2019), Ian Cheng (2018), James Bridle (2016 – 2021), Jenna Sutela (2019), Pierre Huyghe (2018 – 2019), Hito Steyerl (2019), Daisy Ginsberg (2022 – 2024) and Refik Anadol (2024). All these pioneering projects have bridged the virtual with the physical worlds.

Centred on the collective creation of new vocal datasets, governance frameworks and polyphonic AI models, The Call positions the process of data collection and AI model-training as artmaking. This results in an experience of human and machine voices in which the audience becomes entwined with, and at times part of, the choir.

For Herndon and Dryhurst, AI is to be approached as a ‘coordination technology’. For millennia, group singing and its associated techniques, such as call and response, have been rituals for mass communication, enabling us to build spaces and structures for gathering, processing, transmitting information, and creating meaning in social and civic life.

Navigating today’s AI systems requires similar coordination. A central component of the exhibition are newly commissioned choral AI models trained in collaboration with choirs throughout the UK. To train the AI models, Herndon and Dryhurst composed a songbook of hymns and singing exercises which were sung by fifteen ensembles and captured by a multi-channel recording protocol as part of a choral dataset tour in Spring 2024, from Belfast to Leeds, from Bristol to Beith, and many other cities.

The Call will both show how AI can enhance the power and artistry of the voice, and envisage new cultural, legal, and technical methods necessary to build AI systems collaboratively and ethically.

LAUREN HALSEY EMAJENDAT

SERPENTINE SOUTH
FRIDAY 4 OCTOBER 2024 - SUNDAY 2 MARCH 2025
PRESS VIEW THURSDAY 3 OCTOBER 2024, 9.30AM-12PM

From October, Serpentine South will present emajendat the first solo exhibition in the UK of Los Angeles-based artist Lauren Halsey. Halsey’s wide-ranging practice is deeply rooted in the neighbourhood of South Central Los Angeles in which her family has lived for generations.

Making immersive installations and stand-alone objects, Halsey archives and remixes the changing signs and symbols populating her environment, offering a celebration of the community’s vitality and a creative form of resistance to its growing gentrification. Her vibrant, energetic work merges past, present and future via her interests in the iconography of ancient cultures in the African diaspora, visionary architecture and the graphic maximalism associated with Funk. At once radical and collaborative, Halsey’s practice extends to Summaeverythang, the community center she founded in 2020 that is ‘dedicated to the empowerment and transcendence of black and brown folks socio-politically, economically, intellectually and artistically’. Halsey will transform the gallery with a new installation.