Berlin’s contemporary art ecosystem is hosting an important exhibition that transforms the tension between technological determinism and artistic production into a constructive paradigm. The ongoing exhibition at KW Institute for Contemporary Art titled “Starmirror” by Holly Herndon and Mathew Dryhurst defines artificial intelligence (AI) not as a tool of automation, but as a “coordination technology” hybridized with human agency. This review evaluates the new digital infrastructures proposed by the project and its approach of “treating protocol as a medium” from an academic perspective.
Protocol Aesthetics and Data Sovereignty
The practice of Herndon and Dryhurst focuses not on the final product of artistic production, but on the systemic rules—or protocols—that enable that product to exist. The Arboretum installation at the entrance to the exhibition is the first concrete manifestation of this approach. The images displayed here are outputs of Public Diffusion, a model developed by the artists and trained entirely on public domain data.
- PD40M Dataset: This set, consisting of 40 million high-resolution images, offers a technical response to debates around consent and ownership in data-mining processes.
- Conceptual Framework: By conceptualizing AI models as co-creation mechanisms, the artists aim to shift the user from a passive consumer to an active social mediator.
Trans-Historical Intertextuality: Hildegard von Bingen and Neural Networks
At the conceptual core of the exhibition lies the 12th-century Benedictine abbess and polymath Hildegard von Bingen’s Ordo Virtutum (1151), a morality play. The analogy drawn between the spiritual hierarchies of the Middle Ages and the layered logistics of modern neural networks constitutes the exhibition’s most striking theoretical move.
The Ur-Hildegard Training Corpus, a liederbuch (songbook), contains medieval notations reinterpreted through machine learning models. Here, the artists establish an ontological parallel between the hierarchy of angels and the abstraction ladders proposed by computer scientist Geoffrey Hinton. The quest for universal harmony in divine visions has given way to the mathematical harmony sought in data.
“The Hearth” and the Materiality of Physical Infrastructure
In KW’s main hall (Halle), an immersive installation created in collaboration with the design studio sub tests the abstract nature of AI against a physical space. At the center of the constructed sound laboratory stands The Hearth (2024), an “acoustic organ” that emphasizes the material reality of technology.
- Cooling and Sound: The instrument is driven by the fans that cool the GPUs (graphics processing units) running the AI models. This transforms heat and noise—the by-products of digital computation—into an art object.
- Collective Training: Throughout the exhibition, visitors can participate in “Call and Response” sessions, contributing their own voices to the dataset. This collective input feeds the training of a “Berlin AI Chorus” that will make its first public appearance at the end of the exhibition in Düsseldorf (Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen).
Current Program and Closing Events
As the exhibition enters its final week, a series of events have been planned to deepen its theoretical dimension:
- 15 January 2026: Panel discussion on the performativity of AI systems.
- 16 January 2026: Curatorial conversation with the artists and technology designers.
- 17–18 January 2026: “Starmirror Training Performance” series representing the final phase of the exhibition.
Starmirror stands as a candidate for a unique place in media art history by positioning artificial intelligence not as a post-human threat, but as a modern extension of group rituals older even than language itself.
