Whitney Biennal Includes Mat & Holly

The 2024 Whitney Biennial took on the topic of AI, without actually fully committing to its investigation. It did, however, include Holly Herndon and Mat Dryhurst’s xhairymutantx, an interactive piece built around a generative model that investigates themes of identity, digital presence and the malleability of training data. Presented both in the museum’s sixth-floor gallery and online via artport, the project manipulates Herndon’s visual likeness. Viewers are able to distort her recognizable red hair and features through AI-generated transformations dictated by prompting. The work subverts traditional text-to-image models by limiting the viewer to the world of the artist’s creation rather than the generalities of a generic deep generative model. It was interactive and gave users permission to enjoy using generative AI—many perhaps for the first time.