Early life and education Holly Herndon was born in 1980 and raised in
Johnson City, Tennessee.
Movement (2012) While attending Mills she began developing her debut album
Movement. with a video directed by Dutch design studio
Metahaven. According to Herndon, it captures her feeling of losing trust in electronics after the revelations the
NSA monitors what some Americans do online. "Home" continues "Chorus"'s theme of surveillance: "It is a love song for prying eyes (an agent / a critic), and also a break up song with the devices with which I shared a naive relationship." and includes a track titled "Lonely at the Top" that is intended to trigger
Autonomous sensory meridian response (ASMR). Addressing themes of internet decentralization by actively exploring the concept of decentralized autonomous organizations (
DAOs),
Platform was created through the Internet in collaboration between Dryhurst and Herndon and strangers from all over the world.
Recruit (2015) In 2015, Dryhurst and Herndon released an eleven minute long track called "Recruit", which they made for British menswear line Cottweiler. The artwork merges outdoor soundscapes alongside Herndon's treated vocal samples. This collaborative work with Dryhurst and programmer Jules LaPlace involved a singing AI named Spawn, which they developed over the course of several years. Spawn is an
artificial neural network that is trained to recognize and replicate human voices. They also trained Spawn to learn diverse vocal types by having it listen to the singing voices of others. While making
Proto, they held "training ceremonies" which are live performances where participants sing to Spawn.
Holly+ (2021) In 2021, Dryhurst and Herndon developed Holly+, a protocol that addresses concerns associated with deepfakes and distributed "identity play." Holly+ is a method to decentralize Herndon's own identity, which enables a community of stewards to determine whether new media created with her voice should be co-sold in collaboration with Holly herself. Holly+ was also presented at TED2022: A New Era in April 2022 with Pher. In November 2022, Holly+ performed a cover version of Dolly Parton's
"Jolene". A modified score of the original song composed of new tonal harmonies was fed to Holly+ and then generated in Herndon's voice. Dryhurst and Herndon won the 2022 Ars Electronica STARTS prize for digital art for Holly+. Some of these songs were sold on as NFTs on the Zora platform.
Touring and exhibitions Herndon has toured throughout Europe and the United States. She played the
CTM Festival In May 2016, Herndon played seven shows with Radiohead in Amsterdam, Paris and London. She was joined on stage by Mat Dryhurst and Colin Self. Herndon's first foray into exhibiting her own visual art installations in an art gallery was in 2015, at Hamburg's Kunstverein space. The project was commissioned by
ZKM | Center for Art and Media's Sound Dome. The exhibition, titled
Everywhere and Nowhere, featured a combination of a 23.2-channel sound installation and related video works, as well as live performances by dancer and choreographer Jone San Martin, Jiu Jitsu fighter Sam Forsythe, and artist Brian Rogers.
Spawning , foreign minister of Austria. In 2022, Dryhurst and Herndon, along with Jordan Meyer and Patrick Hoepner launched Spawning. They coined the term "spawning" to describe generating media from a training set using machine learning. Spawning enables artists to consciously opt in or out of the datasets which AI art generators use to train and create compositions. They set up a website called haveibeentrained.com, where artists can search the nearly 5.8 billion images in the Laion-5b dataset that is used to train AI art models
Stable Diffusion and
Midjourney. Spawning's approach has been cited as being instructive towards guiding the
European Union's policy on text and data mining. In 2023, Spawning launched Source.plus, "a tool to search and curate image collections into individually tailored training datasets." As of 2026, the site is no longer available and the domain for sale.
Teaching Herndon has taught, lecturered, and performed workshops at conferences, festivals, academies, and mentorship programs, such as Forecast in Berlin. == Discography ==