On 10 May 2019 Holly Herndon released her third full-length album 'PROTO'. While the album isn’t about A.I., much of it was created in collaboration with her own A.I. ‘baby’, Spawn.
Spawn is an artificial neural network developed in partnership with long time collaborator Mathew Dryhurst and ensemble developer Jules LaPlace. You can hear traces of Spawn throughout the album, and listen in on live training ceremonies conducted in Berlin, in which hundreds of people were gathered to teach Spawn how to identify and reinterpret unfamiliar sounds in group call-and-response singing sessions.
From the press release:
'PROTO' makes reference to what Holly refers to as the protocol era, where rapidly surfacing ideological battles over the future of A.I. protocols, centralised and decentralised internet protocols, and personal and political protocols compel us to ask ourselves who are we, what are we, what do we stand for, and what are we heading towards?
This is a collection of taxonomy terms that allow a type of immersive or XR performance to be categorised.