Art in the Age of AI: A Conversation Between Holly Herndon, Mat Dryhurst, and Hans Ulrich Obrist

Listen in as three longtime colleagues, collaborators, and friends continue an ongoing conversation, probing the big ideas on their minds as artists and curators reshape their field in dialogue with technology.

Earlier this year, multidisciplinary artists Holly Herndon and Mat Dryhurst, together with curator and art historian Hans Ulrich Obrist, co-curated Strange Rules at Palazzo Diedo in Venice. The show explored the idea of protocol art — art that doesn’t just use today’s technologies but pulls back the curtain on them. The usually invisible systems that shape how culture gets made and seen — AI, algorithms, apps, and beyond — become the artistic material itself. In protocol art, the artwork stops being a fixed object and becomes something closer to a living process that is built on instructions and open to collaboration, including collaboration with the viewer and with machines.