Holly Herndon & Mat Dryhurst: Protocol Art

About

Made possible by the Millicent Greenwell Clapp Studio Art Series Fund, this series invites an artist each quarter for a two-day visit consisting of studio critiques with our MFA students and an evening public lecture. This series continues to provide a dynamic platform for artists to engage with the Stanford community, fostering critical dialogue and creative exploration.

Protocol Art

In this lecture, Herndon and Dryhurst discuss projects from their expansive practice and their concept of Protocol Art, an approach that treats the creation of and intervention in the systems, protocols and rules shaping cultural production as an artistic medium.

Holly Herndon and Mathew Dryhurst are Berlin-based artists renowned for their pioneering work in music, machine learning, and governance. Their practice creates precedent-setting projects where technical systems are artworks unto themselves, operating at the intersection of art, technology, and infrastructure — work they describe as Protocol Art: interventions at the level of systems and protocols rather than objects, arguing for agency at the infrastructure layer.

Together they run Herndon Dryhurst Studio, and have co-produced critically acclaimed albums including Platform (4AD/RVNG 2015) and PROTO (4AD/2019), and developed Holly+, a protocol for shared ownership and licensing of an artist's identity and intellectual property.

In 2022, they co-founded Spawning, an organization that attempted to build a web-scale data permissions protocol for AI. Its tools Have I Been Trained and the Do Not Train standard — covering 2 billion+ works — proved influential in machine learning policy discussion.

Their work has been exhibited internationally at major institutions including The Call at Serpentine Gallery, London; Starmirror at KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin; and xhairymutantx at the 2024 Whitney Biennial, New York. In 2024 they published All Media is Training Data (König Books), a retrospective of their career and a position statement on the future of AI and art. In 2026, they present Strange Rules at Palazzo Diedo in Venice, a major exhibition co-conceived with Hans Ulrich Obrist, presented by Berggruen Arts & Culture.

Holly holds a doctorate in Computer Music from Stanford University. Her awards include the 2022 Ars Electronica STARTS prize, Austria's first Digital Human Rights Award (2024), the Kairos Prize (2025), and the Deutschen KI Prize (2025). Mathew is a Senior Research Associate at HAI Lab and fellow at the Institute for Ethics in AI at Oxford University, and has held faculty positions at NYU and the European Graduate School. He is a widely consulted voice on AI policy, copyright, and the political economy of cultural production, contributing to debates around data rights and the governance of generative AI.